Microsoft paying Murdoch to delist Newscorp properties from Google?

[obonicus]

Spotted this (http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/23/0644233/Murdoch-Microsoft-Deal-In-the-Works) on /.:


The Financial Times reports that Microsoft is in discussions to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, to 'de-index' its news websites from Google, (...)


Ft article here (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a243c8b2-d79b-11de-b578-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1). There's a boing-bong editorial in the slashdot link.

And last week I saw the wackier news that Mark Cuban was counseling something similar (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/17/google_delisting_payments/):


Would the top 1k most visited sites take a cool $1mm each, plus a commitment from MicroSoft or Yahoo to drive traffic through their search engines to more than make up for the lost Google Traffic.


I'm one of those people who's deeply suspicious of google, but, uh.

[nutball]

You know, the coverage I've seen of this issue has Rupert Murdoch threatening to block Google all of his own accord, with a sub-text that he thinks search engines should pay to index his products. He also, it's reported, is encouraging other media outlets to follow his lead. He's been banging on about this for quite a while, at least a year if my memory isn't faulty.

This is a different emphasis to what you've titled this thread. "Rupert Murdoch attempts to extort money from Google and Microsoft".

[obonicus]

This is a different emphasis to what you've titled this thread. "Rupert Murdoch attempts to extort money from Google and Microsoft".

Sure, I remember that story. Did you read the FT story, though? MS isn't just in talks with News Corp, they've gone after other publishers. Rupert Murdoch 'attempting to extort money' isn't anywhere; care to provide a link to news that corroborates your claim? And not just the story about News Corp wanting to go subscription-only for its content, you are saying that this is an extortion attempt by Murdoch, you'd need something to that effect. That said, if the mods think that my thread title is inappropriate, its their prerogative to change or close it outright.

[Acert93]

Google is interesting. My wife's site gets about 300k visitors a month. They upped her PR rank 1 level and with the same amount of traffic they nearly doubled the value of her adsense. It all seems very arbitrary to me, especially when we browse competitive search categories and see Google filled with spam up top unrelated to the search terms and how frequently inferior content is able to weasle its way up. We have a pretty SEO strategy and it helps a lot but I can see the arguement and suspicion toward search engines--they can make or break sites. I remember a number years back a customer doing a "100 Best" site with pretty lame "reviews" that were tied directly into affiliate programs. In turn he pushed his site into the top of search terms and made hundreds of thousands of dollars for essentially marketing posing as service reviews.

[nutball]

Rupert Murdoch 'attempting to extort money' isn't anywhere; care to provide a link to news that corroborates your claim?

Erm... I wasn't claiming that. I was illustrating how easy it is write a misleading headline! My pseudo-headline and your thread title each suggest that one of the two parties is the driving force behind the initiative. I suspect in truth it's more like half-and-half.

[obonicus]

Oh, sure. I actually didn't intend to make it seem like Microsoft was the initiator, but rather the actor of interest (since this is the ethics of tech forum), but I guess I failed.

[Florin]

They should totally make it impossible for News Corp websites to be indexed by Google. Take it to Bing where there's no risk of hapless individuals being led to their websites.

[rpg.314]

I'd like to see this actually happen. It would be interesting to see who loses, Google or murdoch.

[Silent_Buddha]

You know, the coverage I've seen of this issue has Rupert Murdoch threatening to block Google all of his own accord, with a sub-text that he thinks search engines should pay to index his products. He also, it's reported, is encouraging other media outlets to follow his lead. He's been banging on about this for quite a while, at least a year if my memory isn't faulty.

This is a different emphasis to what you've titled this thread. "Rupert Murdoch attempts to extort money from Google and Microsoft".

It isn't so much indexing the content as it is caching/redisplaying content without users actually going to the original host (news) site. Thus you have situations where Google benefits through the work done by others without paying a single penny for it. When those sites are spending hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of dollars in order to field a fleet of journalists around the globe to cover "newsworthy" events. As well as doing at least some fact checking/background checks. None of which is cheap or free. And at the end of the day, traffic that should be going to their sites to generate ad revenue isn't because Google or some other entity is displaying it as a cached site, summarized story, news blurb, or just plagarised the content in the first place.

Google basically makes its money off the hard work of others. And anyone that complains that they should get a share will be quickly attacked by Google and in some cases blackballed.

Regards,
SB

[BRiT]

Google should drop any and all Murdoch owned media from their search engine. We'll see who's impacted more.

[rpg.314]

Google basically makes its money off the hard work of others. And anyone that complains that they should get a share will be quickly attacked by Google and in some cases blackballed.

Regards,
SB

How does google make money if people click on the link that takes them to news story? Which btw happens 99% of the time when ppl search for news. So murdoch is mad at the 99 clicks he got and wants to be paid for the last click too, even though he didn't pay a dime to google for the first 99 clicks? :???:

[nutball]

It isn't so much indexing the content as it is caching/redisplaying content without users actually going to the original host (news) site. Thus you have situations where Google benefits through the work done by others without paying a single penny for it. When those sites are spending hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of dollars in order to field a fleet of journalists around the globe to cover "newsworthy" events. As well as doing at least some fact checking/background checks. None of which is cheap or free.

Well, see living in the UK I pay a TV license fee to fund the BBC, who basically do most/all of the above and stick their news and other content on the web for free. Free to me at least. From where I sit Google indexes the BBC web sites too, the BBC isn't ad funded so it matters not whether I click through their site. The BBC also spends a lot of money doing news collection and fact-checking to some degree, just like News Corp.

Murdoch has big issues with the BBC too.

[Sxotty]

He said they would be rolling back access on WSJ already also.

[Colourless]

Google is interesting. My wife's site gets about 300k visitors a month. They upped her PR rank 1 level and with the same amount of traffic they nearly doubled the value of her adsense. It all seems very arbitrary to me, especially when we browse competitive search categories and see Google filled with spam up top unrelated to the search terms and how frequently inferior content is able to weasle its way up. We have a pretty SEO strategy and it helps a lot but I can see the arguement and suspicion toward search engines--they can make or break sites. I remember a number years back a customer doing a "100 Best" site with pretty lame "reviews" that were tied directly into affiliate programs. In turn he pushed his site into the top of search terms and made hundreds of thousands of dollars for essentially marketing posing as service reviews.

Pretty much the same happened to my Girlfriends site giraffian.com (http://giraffian.com). The Pagerank went up and the ads started paying A LOT better.