Comments on: Some quick thoughts about Google versus the newspapers

By: Rupert Murdoch Won’t Jump Until Everyone Does | Techization

Rupert Murdoch Won’t Jump Until Everyone Does | Techization — Thu, 07 May 2009 21:59:54 +0000

[...] Some have suggestedto ease on looking at Murdoch as a ‘media dinosaur’, I would have to disagree. Someone else’s biography of Murdoch will not change my opinion on his business decisions and statements on important stages. [...]

By: Google -v- The Newspapers: Rupert Murdoch throws down the gauntlet www.technovia.co.uk - Twitoaster

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 23:26:43 +0000

[...] 5, 2009 Google -v- The Newspapers: Rupert Murdoch throws down the gauntlet http://www.technovia.co.uk/2009/04/some-... [...]

By: ianbetteridge

ianbetteridge — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:14:03 +0000

He's realised that for a very long time. Murdoch's first significant investment in online dates back to 1993, when News Corp bought the then-quite-popular online service Delphi. And he's had some pretty smart people working for him along the way (Clay Shirky did a stint consulting for News Int in the late 90's or early 2000's)

By: Jared Earle

Jared Earle — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 20:57:03 +0000

I would go so far as to say those not on the internet are not relying on newspapers for their news. TV is the first news outlet of the poor.

Besides, the battle for news Murdoch is describing isn't Google versus print media; it's Google versus newspaper's websites. It has nothing to do with printed newspapers; that's another debate altogether, and one we're too late to as it's already been decided.

If Murdoch is defending his corner of online newspapers, it's because he realises it's where the real battle will take place.

By: ianbetteridge

ianbetteridge — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 20:22:38 +0000

That would only be true if no one paid for servers, bandwidth, support, maintenance, redundant capacity, and so on. Those costs are always incremental – the more people who view your site, the more it will cost you. And with increasing use of video as well as text, those incremental costs will mount up. On a per-user basis, they will always be small – but with millions of page impresssions per day, they can add up fast.

By: Jacquie

Jacquie — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 20:12:43 +0000

It is a shame we are putting all of our eggs into the Cyber world basket!
If we lose newspapers and magazines as a viable source of news, information, education, and entertainment, what will become of it all when those sattlelites falter, fail, or get lost to a Space war?
In the meantime, MILLIONS of Americans are being kicked to the curb if they can not afford A- a computer, or B- internet service. AND believe it or not, outside of major metro cities, there really are Millions of people in the US that DO NOT OWN A COMPUTER!
SO when the news says "for the rest of this story to go our website", that kills it for those who can not go the computer.

And despite fair use, first sale, etc, copyright does exist and is legally binding even for Google!

By: DavidS

DavidS — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:41:36 +0000

Re “…even online every reader has an incremental cost.” Sorry, your microeconomics are wrong. Creating content is a fixed cost. Additional readers are an incremental cost only if it costs money to acquire them. Since the content producer is not paying the reader acquisition cost there is no incremental cost. However, there is an opportunity cost of lost advertising revenue if – in the absence of Google or other search engines – the content creator would have appropriated more advertising revenue from that incremental reader.

By: ianbetteridge

ianbetteridge — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:50:33 +0000

Because, in advertising terms, page view isn't worth a penny a view.

Unlike PPC, page view costs you additional money to measure its results. You have to establish silent cells which aren't exposed to the ads. You can't measure quickly, as you have to wait for the long-term effects of brand exposure to shake out. And so on.

So why is that a problem? Surely newspapers can sell PPC just as well as anyone else?

Well, the problem lies not in PPC as such, but in the way that search traffic differs from organic traffic. When someone arrives at your newspaper page from search, they have already been exposed to a set of highly-contextual, targetted PPC ads. If they wanted to click on an ad, they would already have done so - on Google's page, delivering all the revenue to Google.

In effect, with PPC, Google creams off the best advertising targets from search traffic before it even hits your site. That's why, for traffic to your site from search, you will never achieve higher PPC rates than Google itself.

That's why I talk about Google being a competitor to newspapers - and one that's in the position to get all the best traffic before it even hits their content.

Effectively, Google uses the content as a carrot to get the best prospects (as they'd put it in ad-speak), without paying a penny for the content.

By: ianbetteridge

ianbetteridge — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:44:25 +0000

Just an aside, but an interesting talking point...

The problem with trying to predict the future from a point when things are changing fast is that you can't extrapolate from that point very well.

For example, suppose you were a medieval futurologist, looking at the revolution in the printed book 20 years after Gutenburg or Caxton. From the sudden, huge change you might have predicted that within 20 years everyone would have their own personal printing press.

That didn't happen, because change can be sudden, radical, change the world - and not maintain that pace.

To pick out another point...

"Every thing today is about making information easier to share. When media companies do this, revenue and readership expand."

I hear this a lot. Can you give me a solid, ROI-based case where it's true, and the increase in revenue (readership is irrelevant) can't be attributed to any other factor?

By: Zac Echola

Zac Echola — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 07:41:33 +0000

If it costs in the hundredths of a penny per user per day, how is it that sites can't run up huge margins selling every page view for a penny? That may lead to smaller streams of actual revenue, or it may lead to more, depending on how large the site's traffic. Either way, you're talking massive margins.

I think this is a sales issue within traditional media organizations.

Newspapers try to bring a limited display advertising model to the Web when they should be reaching out to thousands or hundreds of thousands of businesses to offer incredibly cheap advertising options.

They should be selling highly targeted segments of users, not mass, as they would sell the paper. I guess I just described Google, but newspapers, especially in America, have a geographic advantage Google can't easily approach.