« Twittered By An Academy Member This Morning | Main | BYOB For A Fresh Week Of Vampires »
November 16, 2009
When News Corp Met Google
So, Rupert Murdoch seems intent on leading the charge against invasive aggregation. Google is, amazingly, the most constant target.
Here are three interesting perspective pieces on the current state of the situation...
Doing the Math on News Corp.’s Threatened Google Block by 
(also known as "The Artist Formerly Known As The Bagger")
Ad Age offers, "Why News Corp. and Murdoch Won't Quit Google"
And this self-explainingly titled piece, "Josh Cohen Of Google News On Paywalls, Partnerships & Working With Publishers" from searchengineland.
My most clear view of all this is that Wall Street Journal is a unique proposition. The NY Post is not. The NY Times already found out the painful truth... though many, many people want to read their Op-Ed section, very, very few people will pay to read any one person... and that offering included unlimited search through the history of NYT, which is why I paid for it.
Posted by dpoland at November 16, 2009 01:54 PM
Comments
Interesting pieces, but most seem to contain the assumption that the Google traffic wont come to WSJ through other channels instead. It's like saying New Moon sells 40% of its copies on Amazon so making it bricks'n'mortar-only would produce a 40% loss in overall sales; No, it wouldn't, because fans would just head on over to their local Barnes and Noble and buy it there instead.
Granted, in this case there is still likely to be a significant drop in traffic - but WSJ is reasonably specialized and so there's likely a strong set of alternate channels to recapture some of those "lost" hits. Hell, it may even allow WSJ to up their ad offering since it's clearing out the hit-and-run visitors - each page hit is now more likely to result in click-through for the ads. (Unlikely, but hey - channels are looking to specialize their offerings any way they can)
Posted by: Foamy Squirrel ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/nav-commenters.gif)
at November 17, 2009 08:47 PM
Foamy Squirrel, that's where you're wrong. I've noticed that when Google traffic drops by a certain percentage, overall traffic drops by a certain percentage. I've analyzed traffic data from properties at Fox Interactive Media.
Another important thing not discussed in those articles is that third-party metrics tend to be conservative, so the loss in actual traffic will be a bit more than reported by Compete. WSJ will probably lose a bit more in ad revenue than reported.
I guess WSJ have to find out the hard way. I suspect that a deal probably be worked out before they go that route.
Posted by: sharonfranz at November 18, 2009 12:08 PM
Interesting... I'll bow to your hands-on knowledge, but I thought it was an odd assumption to make. There will certainly be a drop in traffic, but given the structure of news channels in general it seemed more likely that the relationship would be less than 1-to-1.
Eyeballs on pages is still a pretty shitty metric for determining ad rates, but I'll concede that it's at least reliable. From the advertiser perspective, they'd MUCH rather have a lower reach if they could be reassured that the people it did hit were more likely to click through the ad and make a purchase.
Posted by: Foamy Squirrel at November 18, 2009 05:28 PM
It's one thing to hide the Wall Street Journal -- a haven for neocons and banksters -- behind a paywall. It's another to force people to pay to read the red-top tabloids and Fox News online.
Posted by: Chucky in Jersey at November 18, 2009 06:41 PM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)