• Marketing Mag Website

  • Marketing Blogs

headshot

by David Iwanow

on Nov 20

Media versus Google

Advertise with us

Tough question but, do we even need Google? The one topic that continues to be discussed in business and publishing circles has returned to centre stage with recent public tantrums from News Corp screaming they plan to block Google.

In September I blogged about how publishers appear to be flipping out over how little control they have over their online content with Google News. Since then, News Corp has made a public announcement it would be moving towards a pay model by June 2010 in an attempt to claw back falling advertiser revenue – without Google.

The interesting aspect to this stand off is that unlike many other publishers, News Corp does have a competitive advantage due to its worldwide network of websites, dominance in the media and established offline promotion channels. If any media company is able to survive without traffic from Google it should be News Corporation.

To give you an understanding of the scale of News Corp’s gamble, according to Google Ad Planner from its network of 54 websites, each month News Corp receive around 11.28 million unique visitors, serves around 846,000,000 page views and reaches around 65% of all Australians. According to HitWise, 25% of all WSJ.com (the Wall Street Journals’ web presence) visitors are delivered by Google. So how serious is News Corp with their against-the-tide future digital strategy.


To cloud the issue as to when News Corp will switch to its pay model, it now seems to be accepted by Rupert Murdoch that News Corp will struggle to reach the June 2010 deadline he imposed. So what’s the rush to block Google?

News Corp has apparently placed its trust in social media as a future source of visitors, but HitWise advise that currently Facebook and Twitter only deliver around 4% of visitor traffic. A likely issue is, compared to other publisher websites, News Corp is not even fully prepared for social media as sharing its news stories remains difficult in even the most popular platforms, such as Twitter.

socialmedia

I look at TechCrunch as an example of a media site that understands the benefits of making it easy to share content via social media. TechCrunch offers Facebook Connect for user comments, Trackback URLs for article referencing by bloggers and assists visitors by pre-generating a Bit.ly short URL.

The public issue between News Corp and Google appears to have started over several stress points:

  • Google launched a free real estate listing service competing with REA Group
  • Traffic drops for MySpace meant News Corp lost millions in revenue from Google
  • Google don’t pay enough to their AdSense partners or charge enough for content placement, and
  • Google News ‘steals’ publishers images, story snippets and even story headlines

So if we are to believe that News Corporation is serious, why are they contributing to Google’s revenue by buying traffic using AdWords? Also a majority of the News Corp network sites depend on Google AdWords for attracting better quality, targeted visitors and allowing them to top up website traffic to satisfy advertisers.

news

There are other solutions that News Corp could explore besides throwing in the towel in its dispute with Google.  Around the world more publishers are either going head-to-head with Google or working to drive as much traffic from search as possible.  Brent Payne, SEO director for Tribune Interactive, works to ensure they get as much search traffic as possible from every story.

The Tribune methodology focuses on following white-hat guidelines and working directly with search engines:

  • Best practice SEO training is run across the Tribune group
  • Continuous optimisation, measurement and improvement of content, and
  • Ongoing development of fresh content based on current events and breaking-news

All these steps could be easily implemented by News Corp – who appear to have worked hard to build non-optimised websites. News Corp could follow Tribune Interactive’s example to vastly increase the amount of traffic leading to increased online revenue.

The BBC is also on News Corp’s firing line because, according to Murdoch, their TV licence funding allows them to compete unfairly against News Corp. This challenge seems counterintuitive as the BBC is one of the few media companies challenging the growth of Google’s embedded YouTube player. The BBC is building its own solution which it has begun providing free to other organisations.

These are two different examples of how media companies are working to ensure they remain competitive, while focusing on providing quality content and solutions – not wasting resources on a shouting match over who is right.

As Slate contributor Jack Shafer points out, in the past Murdoch has been the first to drive down the price of newspapers if he can get the volumes to work in his favour. Is this a reverse strategy to try and drive up the value of his content so News Corp gets paid more be every advertisers?

The freesheet was another failed battleground, where Murdoch started a race to the bottom by giving away his printed content with the pure advertising-supported The London Paper. So can he really play the white knight in the argument over the value of content in a fast moving digital world?

What is interesting is News Corp’s web properties still have a large number of Google AdSense modules allowing them to benefit financially from Google’s AdWords business model. News Corp appears to be playing a game of bluff as they are not making use of robots.txt to advise Google not to index their network of websites.

The process to be accepted into the Google News program and ensuring you stay up to date with their processes requires resources so why haven’t News Corp just requested to be removed? I have even provided the links – there is no reason, if Murdoch was serious about blocking Google, why he couldn’t do it today.

Related Articles

7 Comments

John Grey
  • Wrote on 20 Nov, at 03:43PM
You point to Techcrunch's Facebook link to show how News Corp sites fall short in social networking ease.

I love Techcrunch. And Facebook is kinda fun, and we've got plans to increase the traffic we're getting from there. But where are TC's other easy social media buttons?

Stories on couriermail.com.au have a selection of buttons to send stuff to a popular sharing sites. Our videos have a dizzying array of 170 sharing tools. (Too many choices if you ask me)

If we're falling short on social networking, it's more to do with cultural change than website buttons. This too will change / is changing.
thelostagency
  • Wrote on 20 Nov, at 04:39PM
@John thanks for the comments.

While my views are purely personal I don't think I have ever taken the effort required to submit a comment on any story on any of the News Corp websites. While I agree that sometimes it’s not always appropriate there are many times where the article doesn't give you the opportunity to have your say.

The Have Your Say section shown on the Courier Mail contains the following text. "We welcome your comments on this story. Comments are submitted for possible publication on the condition that they may be edited. Please provide your full name. We also require a working email address - not for publication, but for verification. The location field is optional. Read our publication guidelines."

The text above would scare a lawyer away from contributing not really something that says we care please discuss the story. Maybe edited and we welcome your comments is a conflicting stance.

By using various tools such as JS-Kit, OpenID or Facebook Connect it allows for more engagement from your readers but still retain control. There is even an existing News Corp product MySpaceID that could be utlised across the whole network.

The TechCrunch buttons shown at the top of every article is the # Comments, Re-Tweet and Facebook share buttons. And agree that 170 sharing tools are too many choices as I’m sure many aren't being used. But it's great to hear any website is working to change to make it better for your readers.
John Grey
  • Wrote on 23 Nov, at 05:51PM
The text doesn't seem to deter the authors of the tens of thousands of comments we handle every week, David. Even lawyers dare to contribute.

There is usually one of two reasons why comments are disabled on a particular story. One is technical - if the story is syndicated across multiple News sites, it can't contain comments or moderation would go from being a nightmare to a disaster.

The second is legal. There are quite a few situations where allowing comments on a story would invite a contempt of court conviction. I'm allergic to the idea of jail.
Keir
  • Wrote on 23 Nov, at 07:59PM
G'day David,
it is an interesting situation, thanks for writing on it.
Personally, I would like to see Murdock drown in his own arrogance. But on a less emotional note: I dont think a business would cut out a revenue stream without a little consideration, hence the adword still being present.
This might be a case of Murdock throwing a tantrum to gain some support for a NewsCorp led coup or legal strike against Google. He would be insane to completely block search engines, particularly as there are still many new innovations to come from the indexing of structured data.
Maybe, just maybe, they need to be a little more inovative with their business model.
I agree with Murdock re: BBC. It should be sold for scrap.
K
thelostagency
  • Wrote on 24 Nov, at 11:13AM
@John agreed you get a decent number but is it like the traditional print version that only a small subset comment or write in each week.

As for the syndication issue, im sure there are existing comment solutions that could be tailored to work across multiple websites with a central admin/approval process. I would even love a simple solution such as Ninemsn has with their "Flock this story" as it also allows you to see other popular stores, and their comment advice is nice a clear and easy.

@Keir thanks for the comments, i'm guessing you are not a fan of the compulsory TV license charge that supports the BBC?
Adam Smith
  • Wrote on 9 Jan, at 05:40PM
As the goggle plays its own role and media on the other end plays another role i like both of them as they are awesome.

--------------------


Adam Smith


Lawyer Marketing
Fiona
  • Wrote on 16 Jan, at 02:55PM
I just wonder how powerful is too powerful? Apologies upfront if this sounds like a tangent. But Google tells us what we see, learn or understand because it makes decisions about the information it presents to us for consumption. You could argue that Murdoch does the same, and he does, but not on the same truly global scale and with the same lack of compeition as Google. So Google moves into the book market, threatening the livelihood of book stores around the world (and potentially robbing authors of royalties and breaching copyright), and the mapping game, threatening UBD and Melway (for example), and is (of course) one giant directory, thus threatening the viability of old style phone books. It has already developed online free software (such as Picasa and office software), threatening software creators that are paid for their products... I mean I could go on and on. So if ONE powerful guy, Rupert Murdoch, says buggar it, you can't have my content for nothing (because displaying everyone else's content is what makes Google attractive to begin with), then I'm all for it. I'm not quite sure how he's going to convince people to pay for stuff they've been getting for nothing, but I do think more publishers will end up following his lead for their own survival.

  • Both the above fields are required for unauthenticated comments. * indicates a required field.


    *

    * This email will not be available or visible to anyone.
    (optional)