Is Murdoch Going Off the Grid?
Rupert Murdoch has a strategic vision for News Corporation and the massive amount of content it publishes every day in such major news outlets as The Wall Street Journal, The Times (UK), and The Daily Telegraph (Australia): he wants to take all of it off the grid. The Google grid, that is.
In a recent interview with Sky News, Murdoch said that when News Corp. launches its paid-content strategy, Google and other search engines will be blocked from searching and indexing its content.
Claiming that readers who reach a page of content via search hold little value to advertisers, he said that Google and other websites have had a free ride on News Corp.'s content, with little value accruing to the outlets that create and publish it. When readers click a link generated by search, he said "they get the page with the story that's in our paper. Who knows who they are or where they are? They don't suddenly become loyal readers of our content."
He added: "There's not enough advertising in the world to make all the websites profitable. We'd rather have fewer people coming to our websites but paying."
But before people will want to pay for content, they will have to find it first, say critics, such as Bill Tancer of Hitwise Intelligence. According to Experian Hitwise, Google and Google news are the top traffic providers for WSJ.com, accounting for more than 25% of WSJ.com's traffic, and more than 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are "new" users who haven't visited the domain in the last 30 days.
Murdoch may be gambling that Twitter and Facebook will drive sufficient traffic to News Corp. sites. These channels sent 4% of US visits to News and Media sites in October 2009, according to Experian Hitwise, which also notes that the percentage of upstream traffic from Facebook and Twitter to News and Media sites is up 490% year-over-year.
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I think too much credence is being lent to the Hitwise data. Here is a comment i left on the topic on a MediaPost article about it:
"While I am not defending Murdoch's musings by any stretch, this Hitwise data doesn't really tell us much, at least at such a high level.
First, the fact that Google is the #1 traffic source for wsj.com is true of just about every site on the planet. Unless we know the search terms (which Hitwise does), there is not much of an argument here.
Second, the fact that so few visitors from Google are repeat visitors seems to be what you would expect. If for some reason i got to wsj via Google and thought it was any good, I'd bookmark it/type it in directly/etc etc. So I'd no longer be part of the Google-sourced traffic data set. Again, this seems to be common to most sites out there.
Third, another explanation for low repeat visitors from Google might be that visitors who hit the pay wall remember that and mentally remember to ignore any wsj.com links that come up in subsequent searches (otherwise you would fit the classic definition of insane - a person who does the same thing over and over hoping for a different outcome).
Fourth - something that has less to do with the data itself versus the logic of it. Why on earth would wsj.com expect traffic from Google to be a significant and qualified source of leads? If you look at the Hitwise blog, you'll see that Drudge and Yahoo Finance placed 3rd and 4th - that seems like way better quality traffic for wsj than the great unwashed searching on "balloon boy." I don't think the Wall Street Journal has a brand awareness problem.
Where are all the web analytics gurus on this one?
Again, not saying Murdoch is right, just saying this Hitwise data doesn't seem to tell a story."