Alt-history hypothesis: if the news industry was already being subsidized by search-engine exclusivity, Murdoch would be itching to upend the market and go to Google. Slash-and-burn, not desperate weak-partner deals with assimilators like Microsoft, is his way.
Abroad, they know Murdoch well
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You seem to be under the impression that CEO are actually capable of doing their jobs effectively.
Thanks for the link. I’ve been wondering how cost effective it would be for Murdock to block Google. Tracing through the links, there seems to be enough information to make a rough guess at how much the Wall Street Journal actually gets from Google News.
I’m going to assume that WSJ.com makes about $75 million a year from online advertising. This is based on http://paidcontent.org/article/419-if-wsjcom-was-set-free-the-numbers-at-stake/ so there are probably better sources out there. If anyone wants to find a more definitive number, that would be awesome.
Hitwise, who were cited by a link of Carr’s, have a breakdown of Google’s traffic to WSJ. http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2009/11/news_corp_if_you_deindex_will.html They state that Google News drives about 11% of WSJ.com’s traffic.
That means Google News only drives 8.25 million a year to the Journal. That’s peanuts.
Given that Bing is spending $80-$100 million on advertising (http://searchengineland.com/will-advertising-get-users-to-try-bing-19744), this seems like a no brainer. “You can only find it on Bing” makes a much better tag line than “Just as good as Google”.
Google spent $300 million a year to index user contributed content on MySpace. NewsCorp would be nuts if they weren’t trying to get more money for content that they actually create.
Does anyone else out there have better numbers?