06 Dec 2009
Rupert Murdoch wants you to shut up and pay up, cause he knows best for the internet.
Rupert Murdoch has lost his marbles over paid content.
I’ve watched this Sky News Interview a couple of times now and each time cringe at – not just his ignorance about the web and the role of a search engine in delivering traffic to websites – but that this ignorance comes from Rupert Murdoch – one of histories greatest business men who has built a global media empire through his ruthlessness and being able to predict trends.
To claim that Google is robbing him, by bringing visitors to his websites for free – the visitors you need to justify your advertising rates – is like a theme park telling the bus companies that bring visitor to them to “fuck off – we don’t want your people thank you, your making money by bringing people to us and that’s wrong”. WTF!?
Ok – so his argument is that a more viable business model for him would be to charge for all content and not have to rely on volume of visitors for advertising revenue.
He already does that with publications like ‘The Wall street Journal’, and you know what: for that type of site that’s fine. If I want that kind of specialist financial content, or specialist whatever, I’m happy to pay for it.
For everything else though, why would I pay for it when I can get it from a thousand other sites for free?
What I’d like to know is who the hell is going to pay to read ‘The Sun’ or ‘News of The World’ online?!
Not me.
So you’re welcome to put up your pay wall Rupert. And give Microsoft exclusive rights to index your sites, see what it does to your readership numbers.
And while you’re at it, have the courage of your convictions… tell your web managers to put these two lines of code in your robots.txt files to stop google indexing your sites and “stealing” from you:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
That’s all it takes. Surely someone in your organisation must have let you know… with all the time you’ve been moaning about Search Engines. Why haven’t you done it yet?
Maybe it’s about time for the likes of Rupert Murdoch to accept that it isn’t the 80′s anymore, and that with all the competition in the web, maybe Newscorp needs to content itself with a fraction of the profits it has enjoyed in the old media days.
But Rupert would tell you that if everyone was allowed to have a slice of the pie, the quality of news and content would suffer…
That news reporting should be left to the elite few professional journalists of the newscorp organisation. Because the quality of the news depends on it…
Lets have a look at some examples of the quality of newscorp’s journalism…
This next one was a fake story created as a piece of Buzz content for site money.co.uk by Lyndon Antcliff. Fox news picked up the story and reported it as fact!
You would think the professional reporters at Fox would check the facts of a ’13 year old goes on video game and hooker binge with dad’s credit card’ story before going on air with it, wouldn’t you?
Would you pay for content on Newscorp websites?
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