What’s Murdoch up to with Google?

What’s Murdoch up to with Google? Can he really mean to stop Google from spidering his sites so that people can’t find the news that he is planning to charge for?

It seems barmy.

But you’d be barmy to write Murdoch off as a luddite and a fool. He is certainly neither of those things by a long way. (Pace Stan Schroeder writing in mashable).

So why the - on the surface - rather odd stance?

Well, Google does need taming. I’ve nothing against Google personally; it’s my search engine of choice (or is that habit?). But it is a very dominant (far too dominant) player in the online advertising arena.

And that dominance, enhanced by ill-informed “last click counts” models of ROI analysis, is skewing the marketplace and taking advertising revenue away from editorially-based media owners like Murdoch’s newspapers.

(If you don’t believe that then ask yourself why online display dipped this year while search continued to grow.)

Murdoch wouldn’t necessarily lose that much by REPing his sites. He would of course lose the traffic from Google – but most of that traffic is from people searching on news stories, much of which is one-off, high-bounce traffic coming from overseas and which from an advertising perspective isn’t particularly valuable. Traffic from loyal media brand visitors would be unaffected.

My problem with this is that I don’t really believe that Murdoch would do much harm to Google if he turned his back on it.

Even if all the other commercial media owners followed him (and that's a big “if”, and even then presumably the BBC wouldn't play ball) then Google would just be a slightly different beast: a place where people search for products and goods but not for content. That would be pretty unlikely to affect Google’s PPC revenue which is founded on people who are searching for products and goods.

Google would still be the medium of choice for advertisers looking to generate click through to their sites. And, until advertisers learn that the last click doesn’t count for everything, it’s likely to remain so.

Jeremy Swinfen Green
Digital Director