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A couple of days ago I commented on a Media Post article about this story, but after reading more about this online this morning (for free) I wanted to add further commentary.

Background Info First:

News Corp is rumored to be preparing a lawsuit against Google and Yahoo’s news services for indexing and ranking their free content.

1. Yes I said FREE content – available for people and search bots to view and index.
2. Yes these search engines are properly giving credit to and linking to the source.
3. Yes these engines are giving News Corp thousands of visitors daily.
4. Yes News Corp is generating millions in ad revenue from this traffic.

Okay, so why is Rupert Murdoch willing to throw this all away? – Stupidity

Is This About Principals or Profits?

Newspaper sites like the NY Times went away from blocking search engines from online content when they noticed the advertising revenue potential millions of visitors can bring.

Today traditional news print is dying because they don’t have the millions of views to get ad revenues high enough. The decline in viewership is also what causes a decline in advertising. In short, the days where you can sell news to readers and also sell millions of dollars worth of advertising in the same space are over.

Of course, magazines or niche topics are excluded from this because there are fewer topic sources & people are more willing to purchase a subscription. I’m talking about your “everyday news”.

I couldn’t disagree more!!

On News Corp’s Q4 earnings call, Rupert Murdoch is quoted as saying “The digital revolution has opened up many new and inexpensive methods of distribution but it has NOT made content free.”

I believe there will always be a free source of news online because of the advertising revenues that inherently exist with free readership channels. Some smaller news channel will always be happy to take these profits. Murdoch is simply wanting more.

There will always be levels of journalism quality and maybe the lower levels are more apt to be free, but as long as the basic story is communicated, people will subscribe to the free versions.  Trust me on this. If I have learned one thing from the hundreds of SEO proposals I handed out,  it is that people are cheap.

Search Engine’s Role:

The open indexing principals that exist at Google, and other search engines, are counter to what News Corp is asking. Search engines want what is ultimately best for the user. I don’t think this = ranking pay for content sites. What kind of a user experience would that be?

If Google or any engine went down this path it’s highly suicidal to their market share. Everyone would start to find alternative sources for news that don’t require you to pull out your credit card. It’s that “everyone is cheap” theory I got going.

The Media controls the Media:

This lawsuit is NOT about trying to “save journalism” as it has been spun by some media sources. The side being played by News Corp is well funded and positioned to present their side and little blogs like this one are the ones that fight back.

The attacks Murdoch is making arepurely profit motivated in my opinion because it would be so easy for these sites to block search engines and start charging on their own.

If the issue was really about journalism, let me be the first  to help by offering up some free advice to New Corp: Drop this code in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
  Disallow: /