Newspapers Close to Signing Their Own Death Sentences
indiaBPOking
By removing their content from Google and possibly signing an
exclusive deal with Microsoft
By Lucian Parfeni, Web News Editor
23rd of November 2009, 19:44 GMT
The newspaper industry is strugling, but its actions are misguided at
best
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Most people would agree that change is good. At the same time, most
people are afraid of change. At this point, it isn't surprising to
anyone that the old media is terrified of change, meaning the web, and
it's hard to pick the one that's most afraid, the movie industry,
music labels, or newspapers. It's a lot easier to pick the one which
has been hit the hardest though, most newspapers are struggling hard
to survive. Luckily, they have a convenient scape goat to offset their
own failures, the search engines. Music labels have the Pirate Bay,
newspapers have Google, the roots of all evil in their view, a company
which has been making money by “stealing” content from the hard
working news organizations. Hearing someone like News Corp.'s CEO
Rupert Murdoch talk about the issue, it becomes apparent that the
higher ranks at these companies have little to no idea how the web
works, how to make money online, or how Google works and what it does.
This hasn't stopped them from lashing out at search engines which -
along with news aggregators and that most vile of online creatures,
the blogger – have been taking advantage, making millions while
contributing nothing. All this time, most people even moderately
knowledgeable of the web had one simple answer, opt-out of being
indexed by Google or other search engines for that matter. That's
exactly what Google has said on the matter, “nobody is forcing you to
be included.” Nobody actually expected the newspapers to get out, but
lately, there has been a lot of talk about just this. News Corp., one
of the largest news and media organizations in the world, has been
threatening to remove its content from Google if the company doesn't
start paying. At first, most people were unconvinced that it would
take this suicidal step.
But now there's an even more interesting tidbit, it looks like
Microsoft has been actively courting news organizations, including
News Corp., offering to pay them for the exclusive right to index the
content. This was one of the theories that surfaced when talks about
leaving Google intensified and it looks like Microsoft believed this
was also an opportunity. Rumors of talks between Microsoft and news
organizations first showed up a week ago, on the TechCrunch blog, and
have surfaced again, this time in the Financial Times. There aren't
many new details and the gist of the story is that the Redmont giant,
bent on taking on Google in search, has been talking to several groups
offering revenue sharing and most likely cold hard cash in exchange
for exclusivity.
It's easy to understand Microsoft's point of view to a certain degree.
The company has said that it's prepared to pay any amount to get a
bigger share of the search market currently dominated by Google. It
certainly looks ready to pay for content, which many users would
presumably value, determining them to switch search engines. That's
the theory at least. In practice, Microsoft would benefit marginally
at best while Google would hardly feel the loss. In the search engines
war, it would be a minor victory for Bing, but not one likely to
change the course of the battle. And even without indexing the actual
sites, Google would still index other sites which would link to the
original stories, so it probably wouldn't be missing out on too much.
Therefore, there aren't any big winners but there are some big losers.
For the news organizations, the move may very well prove a final blow
plunging them further into irrelevance. These companies claim that
search engine traffic isn't crucial to their business and that the
users really coming from search engines are of little value to them.
Of course, they wouldn't mind the traffic so much if they were to be
paid to receive it, which is what it all boils down to, money.
The fact is that, while countless numbers of websites including news
outlets have been able to make a living and in some cases serious
amounts of money by exploiting the traffic search engines send their
way, these old media organizations have failed to do so. They get the
traffic, they get the advertising money, yet they still manage to come
out short time after time. And instead of adapting and doing what
everyone else is doing, they're looking left and right to see who they
could get to pay and they've found two possible answers, users and
search engines. Unfortunately for them, neither are actually willing.
The news organizations claim that people should and would pay for
news. They say that if they put up pay walls around their content most
readers, the “valuable” ones, will pay and, on the whole, the
organizations would make more money. This may even work in the short
term. The sites would see a drop in visitors but an increase in
revenue from subscriptions, a manageable compromise if they would
supplement the lost advertising revenue. Most people, though, won't
pay for news when they can get it for free elsewhere. There are
countless others news sites just vying for a chance to steal some
readers from the established publications. And with blogs and other
similar outlets constantly beating old-school media when it comes to
breaking news and even to big-name editorials, the argument that
people will pay for “quality journalism” is shoddy at best.
This leads to the second target, search engines. This one seemed as
unlikely to be successful, just as the first one, but it looks like
the news organizations are getting closer to achieving their goal,
getting paid for receiving traffic. That would be an actual victory if
all search engines were to pay; however, it's highly unlikely that
Google would cough up the cash even with all the muscle flexing from
the news groups lately. In the worst case scenario, Google would lose
revenue and maybe even market share, but it would be able to weather
the storm. So, where does this leave us? Well, pay walls are
definitely coming and it remains to be seen how successful they'll be.
But exclusive contracts with just Bing seem a lot less likely. On the
other hand, it wouldn't be the first time an industry would sign its
own death sentence.