The flurry on the interwebs right now is how Rupert Murdoch has threatened to disallow Google to crawl his news sites and how News Corp. is doomed to fail. I unlike most don’t think News Corp. will fail, but also unlike some such as Jason Calacanis, don’t believe it’s the smartest decision either.
Most people do have it right in that the public doesn’t use Google News much and they don’t search Google for news. I’d bet that most people that follow news have found RSS or go to the website of the news organization. Then we get to what I use for news now, Twitter. Mark Cuban has argued exactly my point that nowadays Twitter is going to be the new way for people to have news pushed to them. Using the previous three methods to access news gains Google nothing and drives all the traffic to the sites themselves. I mean it makes this whole hulabaloo worthless.
As far as my thinking the decision is a dumb one is that of broadening your audience. If someone does Google search a topic and your article shows up of course you would want that traffic. Plain and simple, it’s why stores have free giveaways and loss leaders. Get you in the door and show you their wares.
Calacanis then goes on to say this is Bing’s silver bullet to increase marketshare against Google. I disagree as evidenced by the points above, but also for the fact of if this was really profitable, it would have been done already. Microsoft as of late has been doing whatever it can to gain share so why wouldn’t an exclusive deal, a’la Facebook, not been done. I mean I’m just saying.