So Rupert Murdoch wants News Corp, the big content provider, to shun Google, the leading content aggregation machine, eh?
There are lots of opinions on how this would/wouldn’t work.
Jason Calacanis blogged about how Microsoft Bing could take 10 percent market share from Google by paying newspapers 50 percent more than they would get from Google search referrals.
Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan promptly eviscerated this idea.
TechDirt’s Michael Masnick said Murdoch is jumping off a cliff. Media maven Mark Cuban said that Twitter and Facebook, not Google, are driving search in 2009, heading into 2010.
Ah, no Mark. You might be getting a little ahead of yourself there.
HitWise has cobbled together some nice stats to show just how important Google really is to News Corp’s Wall Street Journal:
HitWise’s Bill Tancer noted:
“On a weekly basis Google and Google news are the top traffic providers for WSJ.com account for over 25 percent of WSJ.com’s traffic. Even more telling. According to Experian Hitwise data, over 44 percent of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are “new” users who haven’t visited the domain in the last 30 days.“
He also said, “And Murdoch wants to give this up?”
While yesterday I bade Murdoch good luck with his plan to hide online from Google’s spiders, today I offer this eulogy, with help from the late Rodney Dangerfield (vis-a-vis, “Back to School.”)
Fare thee well, Rupert. Do not go gentle into that good night: