Rupert Murdoch has said that his Newscorp sites are going to block Google indexes. Of course, all the netizens freak out when this happens. Which I love.
I love to tweak all the internet information must be free bigots. They get so damn religious about information on the net that they lose what little objectivity and awareness of the real world they had in the first place. First a little enlightenment for all of you that think Murdoch is making a mistake. This is not 1999, nor is it 2004, nor is it 2006, nor is it 2008. The calendar is about to turn to 2010. What worked and made sense 3,5 and 10 years ago, no longer does.
What has changed ? Quite a bit, but lets start with this. TWITTER IS SURPASSING GOOGLE as a destination for finding information on breaking and recent news of all types. Whats more, TWITTER POSSES NO THREAT to any destination news site. 140 characters does not a story make. Find it on twitter, link to a story on say, FoxNews and everyone is happy. The same concept applies to Facebook Links. Twitter and Facebook are not news destinations that can compete with traditional news sources. Google is. Rupert loves him some twitter. Google, not so much.
Not only are Twitter and Facebook becoming strong competitors for referrals to news sources from topical searches, they both have one HUGE HUGE HUGE advantage for news outlets that Google does not:
TWITTER AND FACEBOOK are platforms that allow the news sources, like newscorp to post breaking news and gain value from their brand. Google does not. In other words, if I trust a newspaper, tv or any brand, I can follow it on twitter and expect the news to come to me. The concept of “If the news is important, it will find me” works better by the day. If it matters to me, chances are very good its in one of the twitter feeds I follow.
Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008.
Twitter and Facebook have become the ultimate real time programming guides. Look at it like this. “Hear about bubble boy from a follow”. If: “its a news source, go to that news source” If not: “Look it up on twitter (or i use icerocket.com it shows tweeter authority) to see if there are any 1st hand accouts or check my FB wall to see what my friends have to say, if anything” “See tweets/posts to determine how I want to get more information: from TV ( stream, regular, phone), or from online written or audio source” if online: “go to that source from link in twitter or facebook”
All of the above complements everything Rupert and Newscorp are doing. Google is no where to be found in that equation.
Thats not to say Twitter is perfect. Its not. It has a HUGE and growing problem with spam (unlike Facebook updates and another reason why I pimp Icerocket.com). Nor am I saying that Google is toast and has no role. Non real time feed users will continue to source news through Google. I just see that as a declining number in an era where much of our first crack at news is via our phone. But, perfect or not, the bottom line is that in this new era of twitter, things have changed.
News sites blocking Google ain’t what it used to be. Rupert is right. Deal with it.
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this is an example of crowdsourcing at its finest
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“Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008.”
Ever heard of the RSS feeds from Google news? Also twitter and fb would send you to just one news source while search engine news results provide related news too.
Comment by sanchith -
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I enjoyed reading this article. By looking at some of the comments for this article and other related articles, it is pretty obvious that opinion is still sharply polarized. Some think that Twitter and other such services are just a fad, the content on them is mostly useless. Others swear by them. One contribution I want to make to settle this polarization is to point everyone to TipTop, the only real-time semantic social search engine at http://FeelTipTop.com If after you do a couple of searches on this engine, you remain unconvinced about the value of Twitter, I would be both very surprised and disappointed.
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Screw Rupert Murdoch the man is what’s wrong with the United States today. Since ’95 OR ’96 whenever FoxNEWS, that blight on the U.S. landscape came into being the United States has become the most divided that it has been since the Civil War. Political dialogue was perfectly well, and healthy prior to that change in the Law sought by Rupert in the 1990’s that was ushered in via Trent Lott and the Republican Congress, then signed into Law by the usually aware Bill Clinton. We need to at the very least reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine which required that there be a response by the opposite point of view, which was as I recall usually a couple of minutes long at the top of the hour during the break when News & Weather is up. There was a reason those wise legislators of the early 20th Century put in place a Law that said, two major media outlets in one market could not be owned simultaneously by the same entity. At least Rupert’s NEWSCORP could have put in place a NEWS NETWORK instead of FoxNEWS.
Comment by bootspur -
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Actually, you make one very good point Mark. Twitter is a backdoor for Google. They were just granted access to the twitter firehose (along with Microsoft). Soon Google and Bing will incorporate twitter into their search (Bing already has it in beta). So even if Murdock bans indexing with robots.txt, he CAN’T ban people from tweeting with links to his article. So the links are still going to show up on google, just in another location.
Comment by mateo2 -
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Murdock is opposed to all linking. He thinks putting the title and a small blurb about the article is “fair use” which he is against and wants to make illegal. A person tweeting a link on twitter is no different than google news putting up a link. Except that tweeters don’t obey robots.txt. So next step is for Murdock to want to prosecute people on social sites who link to his articles.
Murdock wants to replicate the newspaper model on the internet. He wants you to go directly to foxnews.com. Then go to articles that you have a subscription to, just like with a newspaper. That’s what he wants. He doesn’t want you to arrive at the site in any other way than through the address bar.
Comment by mateo2 -
Good smart thinking, Mark – even if the current uproar seems to confine us to the minority corner at the moment. Whether you like Rupert Murdoch and his media policies or not, dumb he certainly isn’t. And unless this is merely a shewd bid to make the likes of Google finally pay up for all that third party content they’re scraping (like they eventually did for AP and AFP), he may well be kicking off an avalanche across the online publishing world.
Obviously, much will depend on whether the other networks are inclined to follow suit and can actually pull it through. But no matter what will come of that particular aspect of this matter, it’s pretty much certain to change the way people think about the availability (and accessibility) of information on the Web in the near future.
Comment by fantomaster -
Hey Mark,
Since Google and Bing struck a deal to start indexing Twitter posts a couple of weeks ago, I wonder how Murdoch’s going to pull this blockage off?
Bottom line:
Murdoch’s a fossil who’s fighting a losing battle.
Google is delivering all these eyeballs to his content, and Murdoch’s like Moe, the third stooge, trying the two-fingered eye poke!
What a complete putz!
Mark, why don’t you buy a newspaper already?
You seem to post quite a bit on the state of the media.
You could resurrect a dying industry and be the savior of the Fourth Estate.
Show them how it should be done.
Comment by sudojudo -
The unsusbscribe doesn’t work, I select it and apply it from bulk options in the subscription management page and all I get is a blank page. Thank god you don’t comment in your own blog Cuban, I’m getting spammed continuously. Fucking WordPress.
Comment by dasil003 -
Let me see, it is smart to block Google because no one uses Google because everyone (define everyone: collective noun meaning Mark Cuban and most of the people he happens to care about) uses twitter. If no one uses google, can someone remind me why Rupert ought to block it again?
I like circles.
Comment by Andy Wolf -
“I am a voracious consumer of news.”
No, you’re not. You’re a voracious consumer of the news that is packaged and presented in the way that appeals to you by your chosen favorite sources.
Drudge report?
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
Comment by thearchive -
You’d have to be a brainwashed idiot to be loyal to any one or even two or three news sources.
That’s why google news search works and works well. FoxNews.com is absolutely going to lose out on people by dumping google.
Search for a phrase, anything at all and go from there, finding the best sources for that particular moment.
Cuban is telling what we should like, because he’s invested in it, he’s not an impartial observer.
Comment by thearchive -
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I think you’re wrong. Yes its not 1999 but no Rupert Murdoch does not like Twitter either. You wait and see.
Comment by charlesfrith -
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I think you are right on with this and I foresee more news / journal subscription based sites doing the same in the months to come. I have no problem paying for good journalism.
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I agree with Mark and Mike. Twitter and Facebook are platforms that allow the news sources, like newscorp to post news and gain value from their brand. Google does not. It worth to have a look at another article I read recently ‘Google Gets Closer To Music’ http://bit.ly/2m7jUq http://bit.ly/Aax4C http://bit.ly/2DCzIV
Comment by sanmusic2 -
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I am a voracious consumer of news.
How I find the news each morning (hint, not Google):
First stop: Drudge. Say what you will about his politics, but the man has a rare instinct for identifying stories that might interest me and picking the outlet(s) with the best coverage.
Second stop: Twitter. I want to know what my friends are talking about/what’s getting buzz. I also “follow” tons of reporters I respect and news outlets that deliver stories of interest.
Third stop: Techmeme (I work in tech). Like Drudge with headlines/aggregation but focused on tech, and includes LOTS of different sources so I can visit the ones I trust most.
Fourth, fifth and sixth stops: CNN.com, SFgate.com and TMZ.com. CNN fills in the breaking news blanks on days Drudge gets lazy, and occasionally has a good human interest/in-depth piece. Their commentary is the worst! SFgate gives me an idea of what’s happening locally here in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley. TMZ gives me an quick pop culture fix…if I make it to the sixth stop before work catches up with me for the morning (rare).
Facebook simply occasionally serves me up an interesting story from a friend that I might not otherwise have seen. I don’t quite yet subscribe to Facebook groups/fans for news orgs. But maybe…
When do I go to Google for news? NEVER. Okay, maybe not never. I have a few Google News Alerts for topics of major interest, kind of my RSS feed. If there’s breaking news like an earthquake, I might use Google News search to see if anyone is reporting anything yet. I check Twitter at the same time. I will also sometimes click on a Google link to a news story when doing research, but frankly the stories in search results on general topics are almost always way outdated.
So Google has every reason to be worried. Murdoch isn’t wrong. The game has changed. Maybe not entirely, but give it a year. Google profiting off the sweat and blood of others is about to end.
Comment by skibum1723 -
Mark,
You make some good points in your post. I completely agree with your statement “Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008.” The amount of content on the web is exploding at such a rapid pace that a search paradigm no longer works for a discovery use case. I also agree that Twitter contains a lot of recommended content that has been vetted by smart people. However, I think Twitter users face major user interface challenges in trying to tap into that recommended content in an efficient manner. As Miles commented, people have less time than ever, so they need an efficient way to connect with relevant news and content.
We’re starting to see a new category of sites, discovery engines, emerge to better meet the use case of recurring discovery of new, relevant content within a user’s topics of interest. My real-time discovery engine startup YourVersion (http://www.yourversion.com) launched at TechCrunch50 where we won the People’s Choice Award.
In addition to tapping into Twitter, YourVersion also brings each user the latest News, Blogs, Webpages, Videos and Products tailored to their specific interests. We also have a free iPhone app for discovering on the go and an optional Firefox toolbar. If you haven’t already, I’d encourage you and your readers to check out YourVersion: we think it’s much more 2010 than searching for news manually 🙂 but please let us know what you think.
Thanks again for your post! Cheers,
Dan Olsen
CEO & Founder, YourVersion
http://www.yourversion.com
Comment by 650dan -
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Murdoch is definitely in a very tough situation. I agree that the traffic that news sites receive from sites like Twitter or Facebook is more valuable because it acts as a hook to lure in readers and will probably get them stay longer. However, search engine traffic is still very valuable and at the same time accounts for an enormous amount of traffic for someone like Mr. Murdoch.
Google spiders enough sources that if they lose NewsCorp it will not hurt them as much as the other way around.
I am surprised that he did not mention anything about technologies such as the Kindle. Or even an Apple Tablet and further technologies. Once people will be able to have WIFI enabled thin computing devices they will hopefully come back to newspapers. Imagine having a NewsCorp. tablet which updates on the fly with news instead of having to wait for it to come to your door the next day and being outdated.
Comment by mikezachaczewski -
Wow, well I guess this is just one we disagree on Mark. Three points so I’ll be quick.
First, repeat visitors don’t click ads. Ask anyone who lives off Adsense. They need new, organic traffic for ads to work, regular visitors are ad blind.
Second, your points are all focused on breaking news. I guess all news “breaks” at some point, but its the longer term, sustained story that gets readers out of the 140 character realm and into feature length stories… but how will we find them? Oh, that’s right, we’re loyal to our sources… right, that’ll happen. Just like they’re loyal to us.
Third, this will completely submarine the bylines of career journalists. They won’t want to work for non-Googled news sources because they, as individuals, won’t be found. How will he keep writers if their work can’t be found? Pay them more? With what?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against some sort of pay model (freemium seems to work well). But the thought that I will pay to subscribe to a single source and ignore all others? I just don’t see it.
Thanks for the post and carrying on the conversation. It’s an important one for sure.
@jtrigsby
Comment by jtrigsby -
I think that you are both right and wrong.
Yes, social networks (whether that information comes via twitter, fb, etc) are becoming the current choice for drinking from the firehose. It is a symptom of our vanishing trust in authoritative sources. We are finding that we prefer to get our information from people that we relate to — from people that think like us or are willing to debate us. So, you are right that search engines are not the place people do or will go to for news.
However, the major media outlets are also the target of the same trend. People are not moving from google because it is difficult to pull up a news page. They are moving away because they get better news from other sources. By sources, I don’t mean google. I mean that people would rather get it from some dudes blog that works at the company that is in the news. People are tired of the constant biasing of the news from either side. News reporting by the major networks and newspapers has become incredibly editorialized. Frankly, anyone can speculate and people are starting to realize that. So, people are seeking other sources of the news. They are seeking credible, insightful, and thoughtful sources. Fortunately, those folks no longer have to work for the networks and the papers to get their thoughts out there. They can be independent and they can make money being independent.
So, yes, it doesn’t matter that people won’t be able to find these news sites via google…but not because they are getting their references to these sites from twitter, but because no one is referencing these sites. The news that Mr Murdoch is providing is becoming irrelevant. The real bet that Mr. Murdoch is making is not just that they can force all of the traffic back to their sites, but that they can regain their monopoly on the news. That one will be interesting. At the very least, I wouldn’t invest in that sector.
Comment by lstroud73 -
The fact remains that Fox News needs Google a lot more than Google needs Fox News.
That said, Fox would probably be ok without being indexed by Google but it’s a shame to cut off traffic.
What’s happening here is that Murdoch is angling for a deal. He’s trying to get Google to pay him for his content (just like they’re doing for Twitter).
Google screwed up with they paid for Twitter as now everyone else who has content is going to want to get paid as well.
Comment by burtonator -
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tweeter is a fad mark.
it will go away. kinda like “DIG” did. “constant downward slope” comes to mind.
as far as news goes.. i used to go to CNN.com.. then i migrated to a google page with RSS feeds on it.. Now I just look at my iphone AP News app.(it gives local and national) – thats all i use now.. its much better than any combination of the previous. I dont have time to “play” with following people in Tweeter… i mean… i work for a living.
Comment by mverinder -
most people clicking a link from twitter or google and hitting a paywall will just click the back button and click something else until they find it somewhere else. It’s not a google or twitter issue. By the time Murdock get’s his paywall up, there maybe another source to rival twitter.
Mr. Murdock’s writers better create a lot of unique content that I can’t get elsewhere to get me to pay him money. And he better pay his writers well for that content, or they will just sell it somewhere else.
You are still working on the scarcity model, and here’s a free news flash. News isn’t scarce anymore.
Comment by altrenda -
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I think there’s a tipping point. This makes sense when there is enough audience (attention really) that keeps paying the bills and increasing profit.
The flip side is when there is not enough audience/attention to produce revenue and profits. Then it makes sense to keep investing in sources of that audience and attention. Now, I’m not an economist, but it sounds like diminishing returns on investment allows or even encourages choices that yield better results for the bottom line. In 2009 and 2010 I think hat sounds to me like removing a site with a large audience from search engine results makes a lot of sense for higher traffic sites and is not as good of an idea for lower traffic sites.
Comment by Toby Getsch -
Thanks for replying, Mark. I guess I’m still not following you: even accepting that users who find news and content through Google are less committed to the destination sites, and the Fox et all make less money from those users… what’s the advantage of turning them away altogether?
The upsides of getting those users are a chance to land a committed user who will return on their own in the future and some brand recognition.
The downsides of getting those users are… what? I don’t see any at all.
It just doesn’t make sense to me to take a product where your marginal cost is zero and to actively hide it from potential users. Maybe it creates some kind of exclusivity, but in an era when most brands work their ass off and spend a lot of money to get *more* attention, it seems be like a restaurant that only serves people who’ve been there before. Customer attrition is natural; if you intentionally reduce customer acquisition, that can’t possibly end well.
We’ll see, I suppose. I truly hope Murdoch follows through so we can see the experiment unfold. Me, I’d expect the decision to be reversed within weeks, or to see the companies’ online outlets eventually just shut down under massively falling traffic and revenue. But hey, maybe I’m wrong and there’s a way to create artifical scarcity for news.
Comment by Brooks Talley -
Well, it’s high time that we at least had this debate. The fundamental question is whether getting indexed by Google so outweighs the cost of NOT being indexed by them that no further consideration is/should be involved, be that ‘consideration’ falling in the bucket of: A) shared information/analytics; B) access to and manipulation of the index itself; or C) direct monetary consideration.
Personally, this is a (compelling) game of chicken, inasmuch as News Corp would be playing Russian Roulette with the entirety of their online strategy, whereas Google potentially runs risk of setting off dominoes of all big media building a Hulu for Search play that carves Google out of the search equation (i.e., a long tail only Google is seriously de-clawed).
It’s like the cold war equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction, although in this case it would be more like Mutually Assured Chaos, as the end outcome is far from clear.
Comment by marksigal -
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Twitter sucks. It’s just a tool for rich and famous people to get their followers to follow them even more.
99% of twitter users get barely nothing interesting out of using it, other than following the rich and famous few.
Who cares!
By the way, Facebook sucks too.
Comment by charbax -
So will we get to the point where news organizations will be striking deals with twitter on what can be included in twitter’s search engine deals. Such as tweets containing links to WSJ can be indexed by Bing but not Google? It’ll be interesting to see how granular these deals go
Comment by jondillon -
The problem is that Twitter does limit everything to 140 words. So the news on Twitter is like the scroll on CNN. Or Fox News. It’s minimal story all the time.
We’re losing depth. Everything is becoming surface.
Why do you employ Dan Rather? Why does HDNet do what no one else does? Because there is a need for that depth. Even back to Katrina when HDNet broadcast the copter flying over New Orleans. Or when you used to broadcast NASA, live.
The announcers on these shows are starting to sound like Twitter posts. They don’t even make the top ten on influence. But Ochocinco and Alyssa Milano do.
And talk about spam. The spam I get from Twitter and Facebook is absurd. They’re obviously selling email addresses. Or people are hacking them.
From MC> 140 characters isnt a problem, its an opportunity. Because its brief it poses zero threat to news organizations. So they will throw a lot of love and support ot twitter and FB updates. So HDNet and Dan Rather Reports can do in depth reports and win all kinds of awards because of it. We will support Twitter in every way. They are brief, we go deep. And btw, HDNet still does all the NASA launches. Live.
Comment by hroeder -
People searched for news? That’s news to me…
Comment by paulmwatson -
Doesn’t make sense to do away with a huge traffic generator. Do like the Wall Street Journal and ESPN Insider do. Offer a teaser paragraph for free and require a subscription for the rest.
Also, I would venture to guess that a vast number of News Corp’s target demographic doesn’t use Twitter/Facebook. Not everyone lives on the bleeding edge of technology like us.
Comment by fml99 -
But how does delisting from google increase viewers? It’s like if Starbucks suddenly closed all shops on highway rest-stops because there were competing coffee shops at the rest stops. Yeah, now people have to go to a lone Starbucks, but now you lose any potential traffic from people going to rest-stops.
From MC> Traffic doesnt not equal revenue. Most sites have tons of unsold inventory. So just adding traffic does them no good. If you want to use a starbucks analogy. Its like starbucks not letting in people if they run out of coffee or not letting in people they know wont buy coffee.
Comment by loucons -
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I don’t know Mark. I think this does open a new area of competition, and competition is always good. With Google essentially owning the search market, there is little reason for them to improve the service, so something that might take eyeballs away, like Twitter, will hopefully spur them on.
However, to date I haven’t found Twitter to be an incredibly good alternative. For example, I follow the Twitter feed for Amazon.com “lightning deals”, yet 90% of those hot deals are of absolutely no interest to me. So, to get the 10% I want to see, I have to suffer through, essentially, “spam”. Amazon does not have options to customize the lightning deals in a way I like.
And that is how search engines like Google cropped up to begin with – helping you customize what it is that you want to see when you want to see it.
Twitter (or similar services) need a way to me to only “follow” specific things, as opposed to specific “people” (or in this case, ads from a company). I don’t think I would want to follow “Fox News” (assuming I even of their political leaning, which I’m not). I might want to follow “Fox News – Political News – Northern California”, but I don’t think such an option would exist. The way Twitter works now, Fox would have to build all those Twitter accounts to service that kind of feed, and I don’t see them doing that.
Given that Twitter now has an API for searching posts, and Google and Microsoft have inked deals with them for that API, I actually see Google staying on “top” here. Something like Google News, instead of linking to actual stories, may instead link to twitter posts of those actual stories, so Google is still your destination. And then who is to say that Twitter wouldn’t start scraping those TinyURL links posted by Fox News themselves, so that you don’t have to click and leave Twitter to read the article?
However, in the meantime, I think we will all benefit, since competition in this space for eyeballs will only increase.
Comment by bojennett -
I’m with dasil003. Everything Mark said is about how other traffic sources are increasingly important, not how News Corp will make more money once its sites aren’t listed in Google searches.
Mark, can you address that? How does appearance in Google searches hurt News Corp’s bottom line? And if that’s really the case, shouldn’t they also block Bing, Yahoo, etc?
This sounds like utter nonsense to me. Or maybe a strategic suggestion that a competitor blow their own head off.
From MC>, it doesnt hurt their bottom line, its that it doesnt help it. THey have tons of unsold inventory of ads right now. They dont need new traffic. BAck in the day search engines were a great way to discover new websites as sources of information. Today, that is no longer the case. Fox wants you to come to them as your destination. Just like they do for Fox News on TV. If you cant get to them through Google, you have to make a choice. Go to them directly, which they hope will become a habit, or ignore them. While they know they might lose some people, losing some visitors wont cost them money because they have excess inventory. On the flipside, they know that viewers that go directly to foxnews.com and other newscorp sites will be visitors that are far more engaged and committed to their site. That is more attractive to advertisers.
Comment by Brooks Talley -
I don’t understand how Google News is any different than Twitter or Facebook in terms of how much of the story is posted. Google News doesn’t post the entire story – it only posts the headline and the first sentence or two of the story. I think Rupert doesn’t like the fact that Google offers multiple sources for the same story so people can avoid News Corps if they choose. Also, if he makes his sites subscription only, why would people post the links to Twitter or Facebook anyway – they would get angry responses from people who can’t view the sites.
But your point, Mark, is that peer recommendations are better than algorithm results, and to a certain extent, you’re right. However, if that’s all you rely on, you’re only as smart as the company you keep. And if you’re friends haven’t tweeted for facebooked about it, you HAVE to do a larger search. That will never die out. If I want to find articles about a Scandinavian start-up that nobody has really heard of, do I have to rely on my Facebook friends? No, that would be stupid.
I also believe Rupert has an issue with news aggregators using his headlines to draw people into their sites as a first stop, so they can collect the ad revenue. That would include Huff Po, Drudge Report, Facebook and Twitter in my mind, but we’ll have to wait and see what the great propaganda monger has in mind for this crazy endeavor.
Either way, we know his end goal is a subscription model, and Mark, if you agree with that idea, go ahead and place Blog Maverick behind a pay wall and see how that affects your traffic.
If you are a content provider and are silly enough to think of the internet in terms of “Twitter is better than Google News, so I’m going to block Google from posting my content in search results”, then you deserve to fail.
Also, Google and Bing are perfecting their Twitter and Facebook search features and Bing’s are already better than Twitter’s own search. If you think search engines are a thing of the past, you are sadly mistaken.
Comment by Rory Partalis, Assistant Strategic Planner -
Interesting, but a little too personalized as usual. No matter how much Mark Cuban likes Twitter, the Mark Cuban situaion is unique. You have a high number of Twitter followers, and a conversation-generating blog. These are both fertile ground for creating a false perception that Twitter is more powerful than it actually is. The reality is, Twitter only has 40 Million users. Google has billions of unique pageviews a day.
As much as a mid-tier blog like this can REALLY benefit from a strong Twitter presence and Facebook conversation — and I LOVE what social media does for blogs — frankly it’s different for hard news. No one is going to post to Facebook “hey check out this great article on A-Rod I read in the NY Post.” The WSJ is the only paper Murdoch ones that will become more profitable from a gated community. The others get at least 40% of their pageviews from Google, I guarantee it. These are newspapers, not blogs or online-tailored sites like Gawker or Huffpost. People Googling “A-Rod Steroids” are more than likely the only thing keeping papers like the Post afloat at this point.
From MC>actually the NY Post will post the ARod article. If its interesting, then all the Yankees or ARod followers will post about the story. Chances are if you are interested in the yankees or arod, you follow someone who will post something aboutit. It has nothing to do with the number of followers you have. Its the sources that you follow. Its very analogous to RSS feeds and news alerts.
Comment by markcaseyonline -
mark,
you are just a rich fucking idiot. get off the internet and stay in ur 3rd row seats pussy
Comment by thuggets4life -
You make a convincing argument Mark (certainly much more so than Murdoch himself), but I still fail to see the upside of delisting from Google. Twitter is absolutely better for breaking news, but that is just one (large) niche. How much traffic comes from Google organic search, totally independent of Google News? I don’t have numbers, but I bet it’s significant within the first year of a story’s publication. It’s not going to be possible for Twitter to evolve into a Google killer, because ultimately in order to have a search engine that meets most general use cases you need to somehow filter through the cacophony of inane tweets, which ultimately leads to indexing the whole web, which is, of course, Google’s specialty.
Real-time might seem like everything since we’re talking about news, but keep in mind there is incredible competition for real-time eyeballs, most of which is much more addicting than long-format journalism. On the other hand, quality journalism is going age relatively well over at least a few months and years, long after it has been drowned out of the Twitter stream. In that regard, Newscorp has a lot to gain from the Google model.
Comment by dasil003 -
Pingback: Basketball Blog.com – The Best Basketball Blogs Resource Online » Blog Archive » Rupert Murdoch to Block Google = Smart = Twitter has changed it all.
As long as news articles have any lasting value, you will lose a huge source of traffic by ditching search engines. I don’t know what percent of impressions News Corp is serving up to the long-tail, but I can’t imagine it’s negligible. Social media is great for spreading news quickly, but when someone is looking for information on events passed, they will use a search engine.
From MC> You miss 2 points. First is that huge traffic doesnt mean revenue. Newscorp isnt selling all their impressions now. So they dont care about the superfluous traffic. 2nd is that for important long tail stories, foxnews.com as an example, is not some unknown entity. Newscorp wants you to make a choice that gets you to bookmark their site. That bookmark is worth far more than any long tail traffic google can send
Comment by jfredson -
Another major benefit of finding information through Twitter vs. Google is that you don’t have to deal with SEO/SEM gaming of search results. With Twitter, what you get is exactly what you want, not what someone paid to put in front of you.
Comment by mistersporto -
I agree with you Mark! Having to search for news is very 2005. News should be subscribed to…..
Subscription based sites will be the future! Tell that to my previous employers at the Yellow Page companies.
BTW, thanks again for your speech last year. Although nothing happens until someone “sells” something…. that company needs to realize that saturation distribution is 1995 and not 2010! LOL
Cheers,
Mike
Comment by dallasgoogleguru -
I don’t know… no longer coming up in Google searches and alerts will really bit into Newscorp’s market share online
Further, why would a business pay to subscribe to their news when there are so many free/near-free alternatives?
Last, what’s to stop people from copy/pasting Newscorp content and giving it away free anyway on their blogs when they want to give commentary?
By trying to avoid fair use all together, Newscorps is biting its nose to spite its face.
Comment by Daniel Daugherty -
The eventual threat Twitter and Facebook pose to traditional news is the simple fact that people have less time than ever before and therefore they read even less. In fact, they’d prefer to press ‘play’ and consume it that way instead. Lazy people peruse headlines–they gather the jist, read a few sentences and turn the page. I myself read the first 2-3 paragraphs that serve it all in a nutshell (traditional journalism’s style and format) and move on to the next article.
As people continue to consume news as headlines with platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, traditional news writing will continue to suffer as a result. It’s becoming apparent to me when I post an article and receive comments by those I know haven’t actually visited the link and read the article in its entirety–I know this by reading their uninformed reply. This is also very dangerous…
Miles Maker
Writer/Director of “Brown Baby”
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Comment by milesmaker -