If you want to know why Newscorp isn’t happy with Google crawling it’s content then here’s a quick graphic to explain. Search engines unlike most other business models have a right to use your content by the permission you give them to allow their robots to crawl your web content. To date News has allowed this but switching off this right will remove Newscorp content from Google.
Marc, fair enough. But what’s your opinion on the part of Newscorp ? I am split on this issue.I see media organisations as packaging companies. Packaging companies don’t own the product they package do they ? ie Tetrapak. So i guess the way forward for them is to utilise traffic and channel it through a revenue stream on their own websites.Period.
On the otherhand, i also feel sorry for the entire newsprint industry in general. poor buggers. In a way Rupert Murdoch is the only one fighting on behalf of the entire industry. I guess the rest have realised that their gravy trains are pulling into the end of their respective lines.
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@namit
I think if you have quality content or applications you should charge for them so I agree with Newscorp. Pay for content is a returns reasonable position to take. Else, if you want to give the content away to foster other means of revenue then I agree with that strategy also. I think Newscorp will struggle if they charge to maintain their current high volumes of traffic but it will probably improve profitability in net terms. So you have less customers but they pay you. I think the hybrid approach they are going for is right. It’s a spectrum. The company I own shares in, Saasu, has a Google like approach - charge small dollars for powerful app and go for lots of customers. Then provide a free low use offering.
I don’t feel sorry for newsprint. They can change their business model if they want. They choose to copy their competitors model. Crikey as an example didn’t they took a subscription stance a long time ago. Hats off to them for bucking the trend early!
I tend to agree with you Marc. I don’t feel sorry for newsprint, the most radical shift in their business model over the last xx years was web which all business has had to adapt to. Get their already digital content, cut it down, and send to web. Easy.
So the game has changed, I can now receive my news from Google, aggregated from thousands of sources, packaged up on their platform with advertising displayed relevant to my interests.
They could take the Sensis approach and battle on until they serve no purpose.
A good parallel is Google real estate- a mashup of web scraped sales and rental data sourced from multiple sites, overlaid onto Google Maps. This is a serious threat to the likes of realestate.com.au and Domain.
For some properties on Google Realestate, the quality of the data presented is pretty average. But for others its excellent, great quality photos, youtube videos, excellent descriptions and simple filtering. These are the companies that have aligned commercially with Google, have share arrangements on adwords revenue (thats an assumption btw) and provide rich data to the end user. Win Win for all!
If I was Murdoch for a day I would continue print until its redundant, build commercial deals with the likes of Google, Youtube etc to share advertising revenue on quality content and source more niche areas to offer content (high quality optimised app for the iPad at $15 a pop?). I’d buy it.
A quick add - ABC website today has a good summary from their perspective <a href=”http://bit.ly/8WYUv4″ title=”ABC Website”
They are branching out, much further than any other media group. While other media outlets were optimising their websites for mobile, the main menu on my Playstation 3 which used to have five icons including games and movies all of a sudden had ABC iView.