Rupert Murdoch’s War Against Google Will Not End Well

What if someone hosted a newspaper online, but potential readers couldn’t access the content unless they paid for it? Would that be the epitome of short-sightedness at a time when there’s a proliferation of free news, or could it be a shrewd move that reverses the fortunes of an entire industry?

It appears that Rupert Murdoch, the controversial and ubiquitous chairman of News Corp., is ready to find out.

In an interview last Sunday with Sky News in Australia (owned, of course, by Murdoch), the media mogul spelled out his intention to both erect pay walls around his content-generating sites online and to prevent internet search giant Google from indexing – being able to search for or link to – the material. Murdoch, along with many other newspaper publishers, contends that Google’s aggregation of their products devalues them since it costs the search engine close to nothing to troll the internet for content which can then be displayed without having to pay those who produced the material.

“The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them,” Murdoch said. “That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”

One of Murdoch’s best known properties, the Wall Street Journal, already keeps its news behind a pay wall, and, perhaps not coincidentally, is one of the few profitable papers in the country. But even the Journal currently allows Google to link to summaries of its articles, so what Murdoch is proposing presents a radical departure from the status quo.

Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and cable network HDNet, applauded the move. In his view, news organizations can use emerging technologies to promote their articles without fear of diluting the value of their work.

“Twitter and Facebook are platforms that allow the news sources, like News Corp to post breaking news and gain value from their brand. Google does not,” Cuban wrote on his personal blog.”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.”

To that end, Cuban finds the idea of a user performing a search for information archaic. “Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008,” he wrote.

But Murdoch and Cuban are missing the bigger picture. Closing off a site to Google, if visibility is part of your mission, is a self-defeating proposition. For one, the Wall Street Journal gets 25 percent of its traffic from Google, according to Hitwise Intelligence. Nielsen Online, a firm that tracks online metrics, estimates that Twitter has 12 million current users. By contrast, Google drives 100,000 hits to news sites per minute on a daily basis. During the course of a day, that equates to over 144 million searches, far dwarfing Twitter’s results. Twitter would have to grow at unprecedented rates to fill that gap. Additionally, according to the social networking site Mashable, Twitter’s use base seems to have plateaued over the last four months, so investing too much in its transformative powers may prove to be a fool’s errand.

But what about Facebook? According to its own statistics, it has over 300 million registered users worldwide, and it’s one of the most visited sites on the Internet. But, if you’re like me, you use the site for social networking – checking in on friends, finding out about parties – rather than a place to go for news. Yes, links to news stories do get posted, and I do occasionally click through, but there’s no way that I could even begin to rely on the site to give me a comprehensive view of what’s going on in the world given the myriad of ways that people use the site. Some post lots of news; other post some none at all.

Then there’s the fact that people who do have paid accounts will simply figure out a way to disseminate that information to their friends who don’t. It’s not very hard to copy and paste a story into an email that can be sent around. Passwords will get shared. The news will still get out, and it will get out without some people paying for it.

But that’s the crux of the matter. To stay alive, news organizations and publishers still need some of the people to pay for their products, so Murdoch could be taking a gamble. Perhaps he thinks that he can get another outlet – Bing? Ask? – to pay him for exclusive rights to search through News Corp’s material. Maybe. But maybe not. If it’s the latter, then Murdoch might have a lot of quality journalism sitting in a digital ghetto of his own creation.