News Corp, whose founder Rupert Murdoch has for some time been railing at freely available online news has now announced that it will be teaming up with Microsoft in its fight against free news providers, specifically Google.
How this is going to pan out is that “little piece of code in each article would make articles from News Corp publications such as The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and several international titles visible only to search engines that pay”. Microsoft has been very quick to agree to pay for such.
The win for both parties is very obvious here, Murdoch gets revenue for his online content (something which will no doubt help recoup some of the losses he’s making with the traditional fish and chip wrapper business) and Microsoft gets increased traffic to its search engine with, of course the hope that they can then try and keep those users returning to their search engine and become their default if only for the sake of convenience.
Of course the big gamble Murdoch is taking here is that people will identify strongly enough with his media outlet brands to want to seek them out specifically as opposed to taking the news they want from whatever source they get it from. Or to put it simply, Murdoch is betting that users will look for the news as delivered by the likes of The Times and The Sun, as opposed to typing in their subject of interest into Google as is the current norm.
Also he is assuming that other large media houses will follow suit, which could be the clincher. If there is news available for free, then there’d be absolutely no incentive for Google or other portals to line up to pay media’s Father Scrooge for his content.
It could work, assuming his guess is correct. I personally expect it to be no more than a moderate success at best. The biggest driver for growth online is the proliferation of freely available information. It is the very spirit that drives the growth and innovation of the web and any attempt by a man perceived to be the Scrooge of the media could very well face a strong consumer backlash.
Murdoch though is a wily old fox, I can imagine he is planning to introduce a whole lot of value-added stuff, like exclusive content, insights and views by respected subject matter authorities. But, is the market for that big enough? I’m not sure. What I do know is that this type of action goes against the face of innovation, surely there are ways to profit from online news without such restrictive measures.
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