Why Murdoch may be more right than wrong about Google
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Want to know something ironic? I wrote a story earlier this week about Rupert Murdoch. At the time of writing, I thought that he was pretty much wrong. But based on what happened when that story went viral, I think he may have a point. It was hard (if you’re a media-watching nerd like me) to miss the fact that Murdoch had given a good interview to Sky News. They certainly promoted it hard enough before airing it. Despite the fact that Sky News part of the News Corp family, political editor David Speers gave him a testing interview.
And where it got interesting was when it came onto the Google parasite/aggregator debate…
So good, so far. We’ve heard those moans from him before. But many have suggested he’s bluffing — after all — News Corp could always use the robots.txt protocol to tell Google not to index any given page. Up to now, he’s never really answered that point. This time, he did…
Which seemed to me to be a bit of a bombshell, that hadn’t had the attention it deserved when the interview was broadcast on Saturday. I wrote about it on Monday, and embedded the interview, which was on the Sky News YouTube channel. (Note the irony, by the way of the fact that I got my content from a NewsCorp-affiliated TV network and then effectively aggregated it with the help of a Google-affialiated file sharing service). After I flagged it up on Twitter, the story of Murdoch’s threat to Google was vigorously retweeted. And overnight it was picked up in the US. Among others, digital comment king Jason Calcanis linked to our story, describing it as “the biggest news of the year”. It also went big on content-discovery site Digg.
I came in the next day to find that rather than our typical weekday 7000 or so visitors, we’d had 34,570. And they’d gone from being mostly Australian to predominantly overseas on that particular tale. We had links to the story from about 40 sites, the last time I looked. Google was listing 413 related news articles. The Sky News interview had been viewed on YouTube more than 74,000 views (compared to a more typical for the channel 74) It also generated comments in the triple figures on our story, mainly of the view that Murdoch was an ageing idiot who didn’t get it. As I say, I kind of agreed: without Google, how on earth will the world know what you’ve got? We talked about it in this week’s Mumbrella podcast. But do you know what? Almost without exception, those fickle new readers bounced away again after looking at that one page. The traffic was nice as far as it went. Big traffic makes you feel special (and relieved that you’d recently upgraded your server). But it also left us with something of a dilemma. Some of our advertisers are on a cpm deal, which is relatively high, justified by our specialist industry audience. Clearly we couldn’t really justify that to local advertisers when it’s an international audience. So we decided that our cpm advertisers could have that traffic for free, and emailed them to that effect before they started querying our startling analytics for that day. So in this case this disloyal audience was, in all practical terms, not much good for us, or our advertisers. (Although, it will be good for us in the long term for us in SEO terms of course) But it makes me start to wonder whether Murdoch doesn’t have a point after all — not just in the direct value of a small, but paying audience, but also in the higher level of engagement this would bring to advertisers. It then becomes a conversation about engagement — and persuading advertisers of the value of that. There is however a further flaw to Murdoch’s plan — these days, many users treat Google as their navigator and home page, even when they know what they want. For instance, if I want to see The Australian’s media section online, I’ll type those words into the Google search box on my navigator’s tool bar, then click though. But equally, there’s nothing to say that News Ltd would apply robots.txt to every page — arguably some pages could sit, visible, the other side of the pay wall. The move still may not work. But I do believe it is nowhere near as suicidal as many people believe. And for the first time in the last few months, I no longer wonder if Rupert’s lost it. |
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16 Comments
Wow! That’s wild. Next we will discover that online ad rates are falling. Or, eek, that advertising is ineffective in most web environments. (other than directories/search.)
Having discovered arithmetic, can you please move on to logic101?
Rupert has a point but he like everyone else is intimidated by Google.
The greatest strength that Rupert has, that Google will never have, is the potential to vertically integrate his offline media assets and his online assets.
He has not done this yet, an his attempts so far have been feeble.
I’m sure that he has analysed his logs, and can tell the percentage of “direct traffic” that he generates, and the amount that come from SE’s.
Not all traffic comes from Google.
Companies like Deep Blue Sea who own over 500000 domain names generate millions of daily unique visitors.
Kind Regards
“But do you know what? Almost without exception, those fickle new readers bounced away again after looking at that one page.”
Do you know what? That was your failure to hold their interest and click on a link on your page that would lead to another of your pages. A good site will manage to hold your interest for 20 or so pages. Don’t moan that it’s Googles fault. They got your initial hit, it’s up to you to hold the interest.
Look at this page, for an example. Huge empty spaces, there’s some links at the top, but there is no one paragraph teaser paragraphs to encourage me to do anything but close this page once I’ve read it.
I concur with MESKI, this page is a #fail
ironically Crikey already does what rupert is planning…
as for the comment about your advertisers, there are plenty of innovative solutions out there to handle targeted advertising from visitors
34k or so more people now know your brand name, priceless. IMHO
How many visitors would you have received if you were behind a paywall? And would that have been preferable?
It’s not often that any competing media gets the Sun God’s imprimatur. …but during the Sky interview Rupert chortled “You Tube’s a lot of fun”.
If I were You Tube management, I’d be flogging that endorsement to the ends of the earth, as it appears Rupert also surfs the amazing, unique memory lane You Tube uniquely provides.
eg: I spend all my spare time after a 60 hour working week, travelling the endless You Tube highway…what a blast!!!!!!!!!!!!…and it’s nominally free…
As meski says.
Clickable links in the text that link to similar stories, also on Crikey are a way to keep us looking at your ads.
And hahaha, I just ran the mouse over bits that would be good as links, and they are, just cunningly disguised.
That is good for the appearance of the page, but relies on the reader to be following his eyes with his mouse.
With the exception of the near illiterate, this doesn’t happen.
Make your links obvious and people will click through.
Good luck with your Internet advertising dreams Rupert. Like many people I know, I employ every means possible to avoid ads embedded in internet pages.
More strength to Firefox, etc.
“Look at this page, for an example. Huge empty spaces, there’s some links at the top, but there is no one paragraph teaser paragraphs to encourage me to do anything but close this page once I’ve read it.”
Except that this isn’t his site - this is the one he is saying people navigated away from, and as you can see there are teaser paragraphs up the wazoo.
In my opinion, I’m surprised news content has stayed free for as long as it has.
News websites have to survive, and they can’t do that through advertising revenue alone. We know this because none of us take any notice of ads shown on a website. That is of course if you don’t have a plugin to your web browser that blocks them outright.
Advertisment on the web is less intrusive than that of TV, you are forced to either watch ads or walk away from the telly - but there are pleanty of TVs these days that intelligently mute when a show goes to an ad break.
There has to be a place for advertising, but it is changing.
Payed services will come in, and eventually become the norm. It’s a matter of how companies choose to organise their charging model.
In much the same way paying for music online is now a profitable venture and consumers are trending heavily now to doing that, instead of downloading a copy of a file sharing website. It’s become relatively cheap and convenient to do it the legal way - so why not save yourself the hassle.
People want news, Journalists have to be payed and money doesn’t grown on trees. You do the math.
I’ve always thought Murdoch was actually pretty correct on this point. His move will seem crazy to most but I predict he’s setting things up for the way it’s going to be. The internet isn’t just changing how we think about content. More importantly, it’s changing how we think about MONEY. Cyberspace and instant digital access is making money increasingly ‘invisible’. The main reason people don’t spend so much money on the net is because of the hassle. It’s not just handing over the money at the counter, it’s confirming details, credit card numbers, address etc, repeatedly for different sites. This is still the case for a lot of sites but I think we’re now on our way to the point when spending money on the net will literally just take one click. And that is what will fundamentally change how the internet functions as financial medium.
At the moment, it’s like content has been freed of its symbolic, ‘real life’ prohibitions while money has still retained those symbolic limits. But as the technology improves, money on the internet will retain fewer and fewer of its symbolic limits (ie. its value to us) while content on the internet will steadily increase in symbolic value (ie. in that’s it’s prohibited and thus ‘means’ more).
What Murdoch seems to be doing is tyring to channel the internet’s (inherently?) deterritorialising effect towards money and away from content. As it is now, the internet has a way of devaluing everything no matter how good it is. Eventually it turns even the best content into another series of links and hypertext; readers use it for what it’s worth and then move on - there’s increasingly less holding power. Not so much because of the content but because of how the internet is structured and thus how it changes the way we think: there’s always something better only a click away; it’s not about content, it’s about circulation; if it’s free, how good can it be? I myself recently had a bumper couple of weeks for my blog Roger Really (with an average of 7000 views a day) all because of one article on Paranormal Activity. Those numbers have shrunk dramatically in the last few days, not because the rest of the content’s no good or I didn’t link well enough (it is and I did) but because I’m just at the whim of google and whatever article gets caught in its circulation.
Murdoch is seeking to restore some of the symbolic value to the internet, the old fashion way. I don’t necessarily think this is an ethically better position but it’s so different from how the internet usually works that it will actually probably work - if only because people are looking for a new way to value things on the net, a new (privileged) way to attain social capital (which is essentially what the internet’s about). He’s also absolutely right when he says the real question is reader loyalty. That’s the only way to make something financially viable, otherwise everyone’s just at the mercy of the whims and insanities of the free market/internet. Money will become more invisible in that it becomes fused with the medium of the internet itself (you click you pay), and this fusion will allow reader loyalty to become a genuine financial value (ie. continuing visits become continuing credit streams).
You might be interested in my beady eyed meta analysis of the interview, which watched through crikey video of the day last week sometime. I especially liked the screen print of the ‘killer in a suit’ moment about 33 minutes in and arguably the survival body language of Speers who got Rupe in a fug over Gordon Brown and his UK editors.
Who would ever want to be sitting opposite live to air with Rupe with him getting moody? Scary.
Thanks too for the article. But I also think he was lying when he said ‘we were asleep’. Rather he was beaten, like Obama beat McCain and more profoundly beat Clinton via the intertubes. That’s not asleep, that’s knocked unconscious.
So now he’s back and fighting, but who is to say he won’t be beaten again? On the other hand he is alot better prepared.
Keep in mind Rupe is even older than bookish Bob Carr who only 2 or 3 years back - and not being stupid either - said the the web was irrelevant to political campaigning in NSW. Really, he beleived it with conviction. Rupe has awoken and he’s pissed. How good are his genes I wonder. It’s a serious question.
Ah yes, here it is 10 November ‘Now showing on crikey website’ item: Article called “The future of News: an interview with Rupert”
And my comments after watching closedly:
“David Speers looks like he’s having a w*t dream. Grubby perhaps but I can’t think of a better description.
At first I thought I could see a doddering old guy getting vulnerable, then I noticed the burning intelligence and then the ruthlessness.
I would say this guy is a charming snake. Then when [he] gets to immigration his self interest goes forward about building the population as all good growth capitalists do, and mis speaks heterogenous with homogenous. Plays cute on climate change and reveals why News Corp here are climate sceptics to protect their privilege and incumbency.
Theatrical pause on editorial freedom, finally a hard question. In fact I would say Rupe hated that question. And there it is, voila, screenshot at 32:45 - the killer behind the suit, not direct at Speers which is just as well or he would be turned to stone in an instant.
And Rupe is not such a good liar either in the seconds immediately after. A middle distant stare. Cogs getting slower these days. We’re at 32:53 already and he hasn’t nailed it yet. “Things happen” and we’re at 33:02. By 33:41 Speers realises he’s in a hole having got Rupe to reveal [his UK] editors turned on Gordon Brown who is “a friend” has Rupe out of sorts now in his interview, uh oh, hand on chin, what’s next …. shows his wedding ring - hey I’ve got kids to feed Rupe ….
Handshake at end, totally unprofessional by Speers but excellent survival instinct!”
…………………………….
Thus endeth the amateur analysis of the visuals. By unprofessional I mean - since when did a hard inteview involve a handshake at the end. That’s not real. I defer to others on the google intricacies.
Oh, very finally. I did a little piece on my micro news blog about the legal issue of tortious interference in contractual relations as regards any future pro Google encouragement to avoid a paywall. It may even be searchable via google!
Indeed this will get you 2nd hit global search just now “tort law aspect of murdoch paywall”.
Worth a pause in a future potential litigious environment. Notice Rupe says ‘they know the law, it only takes one phone call’.
Get it? Best to know the law.
@Dave: You say ” The main reason people don’t spend so much money on the net is because of the hassle. It’s not just handing over the money at the counter, it’s confirming details, credit card numbers, address etc, repeatedly for different sites. This is still the case for a lot of sites but I think we’re now on our way to the point when spending money on the net will literally just take one click. And that is what will fundamentally change how the internet functions as financial medium.”
If Rupert is looking for this, he’ll find Google is already there. Google checkout. I’d used it in the past to buy something, then bought something else from the Android store, and it ended up being a one click purchase using the google checkout. I can see one consequence of this, which is credit-card companies looking hard at putting a minimum transaction or max numbers of transactions per month. (this transaction was $2)
Rupert alienating google is going to hurt Newscorp far more than google.