Here’s an interesting idea from Mahalo founder and Silicon Valley insider, Jason Calacanis. A couple of weeks ago on This Week in Startups, he floated a strategy that would enable Microsoft to seize a chunk of search market share from Google and the big media companies to make more revenue from their digital content.
Calacanis suggested that Microsoft should offer the top 10 media companies 50 percent more than Google currently pays them in content aggregation licensing fees if they block Google from indexing their content (which Google freely allows anyone to do) and have it indexed only by Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
As Calacanis says in his email newsletter:
So, for a moment, imagine a world where Bing could say in their TV commercials:
“Want to search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and
3,894 other newspapers and magazine?”“Well, then don’t go to Google because they don’t have them!”
“Go to Bing, home of quality content you can trust!”
News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch may not be interested in jumping into bed with Microsoft just to stick it to Google, which he has referred to as a “kleptomaniac” and a “parasite”. But in an interview with Sky News Australia earlier this week he indicated that he is partial to the idea of barring Google and other search engines from indexing his content as a tactic designed to encourage readers to pay for News Corp. content online. He also flagged his inclination to sue anyone reproducing News Corp. content without permission.
While Murdoch has enough clout to shake things up, it is testament to Google’s success that it becomes the target of powerful people such as Murdoch when what they are actually raging against is the internet itself and the havoc is has wrought on their once buoyant commercial vessels. Or, as one commenter over on Mumbrella remarked, “Poor guy, all he wants is those people OFF HIS LAWN!!”
By the way, Google has responded by saying that it has no intention of indexing publishers against their wishes.
Here’s the full Sky News interview with Murdoch (it’s 37 minutes).
Paul Ryan Reply:
November 11th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Anti-trust occurred to me, too. But you could never get the big media companies to agree on this anyway. They’re still trying to play it all on their turf.
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