Rupert Murdoch vs. Google
News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch is convinced that newspapers will go out of business if they were to rely only on online advertisement. Some newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, are profiting from paper version sales and the offering of paid content online. Murdoch is planning to extend this strategy to all News Corp. media properties by blocking search engines from indexing them and presenting free content to users.
Murdoch also dismissed the possibility of striking a game changing deal with Microsoft, giving them an edge in the Bing-Google war, by offering them exclusive (paid) access to News Corp. content.
Search engines are Murdoch’s enemy, accused of stealing content and using it partially in SERPs without giving anything in return to online newspapers.
Actually bringing traffic to websites means making advertising on those websites more profitable and eventually introducing new users to online newspapers, who could result in new subscribers for exclusive paid content.
Google is bringing an estimate of 25% of traffic News Corp. websites receive and 44% of them are first time visitors. Can online newspapers afford to lose them?
According to Rupert Murdoch, newspapers should focus on loyal customers instead, by providing content to subscribers. Ereaders are an important part of this strategy. The plan is to sell subscriptions on a flat monthly fee that would allow subscribers to freely select articles from many different online newspapers and magazines.
This could become a profitable long term strategy: Ebook readers won’t be widespread any time soon, but prices are starting to drop and more competitors are entering the market.
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