Skip to content

A Few Coherent Thoughts on Murdoch Blocking Google

  • by

Yesterday Rupert Murdoch, Chairman of News Corp, said that he was going to have Google blocked from all New Corp. websites.  That means something

From EditorandPublisher.com:

The Chairman of News Corp. said in an interview with Sky News Australia (reported here in MediaWeek U.K.) that once the newspapers get their paywalls, News Corp. plans to pull its content from the likes of Google and others.

Murdoch said: “We’d rather have fewer people come to the Web site and pay. Consumers shouldn’t have had free news all the time — I think we’ve been asleep. It costs us a lot of money to put together good newspapers and good content. No news Web sites anywhere in the world are making large amounts of money.”

Immediately the web went all a flutter, myself included, predicting that that Murdoch would rue the day.  Joe Mandese at Mediapost.com noted:

According to an analysis of Google-generated traffic released late Monday by Experian’s Hitwise service, Google and Google News currently account for more than 25% of the daily traffic to the Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ.com site.

That’s an awful lot of traffic to put at risk.  Now the other side of the coin is that Murdoch knows that showing tons of traffic low cost network ads begging them to Punch the Monkey or telling them they just won a lottery is the absolute path of least resistence.  You go there when you have nothing else to possibly do…

Everything You Think You Know About Blog Traffic Is Wrong

  • by

Brian Kirsten, a great engineer and a guy whose opinion I really respect pointed me towards a very important article by Niall Harbison entitled “How Much Traffic Does TechCrunch Send You?”  in which he dissects that actual traffic volume which the tech megablog generated for him.

TechCrunch itself is widely attributed to have over 4m rss subscribers alone, on top of the 2m unique site visitors that Compete.com attributes to them.

From Harbison’s post:

As you can see the traffic numbers are fairly small. I say they are small yet the article was popular by Techcrunch standards with over 400 Re tweets yet as you can see the referral traffic is not massive. It’s clear that the majority of people read the site through RSS and very few click through to the actual source of the story. I must say this is how I read Techcrunch too, I rarely look at sites they cover instead scanning the site for latest news.
Traffic from Techcrunch

Okay, that’s readers that actually made it back the the site featured in the article.  There were almost as many retweets on Twitter about the story as there were visits to the link in that story for the company it was about.  That borders on depressing.

Sarbanes-Oxley Killed…Round Up the Usual Suspects…

  • by

For the record, I’m the last guy you should get financial or economic advice from.  Even so, I was shocked to find a story in the New York Times yesterday, entitled “Good Bye Reforms of… 

Forget Disclosure and Transparency – We Crave Honesty

  • by

That’s right you heard it here first …the darling of the noveau marketing is “transparency” and unfortunately, it’s the wrong answer.  Transparency and disclosure simply aren’t enough.  For some crimes, Mea Culpa simply won’t cut… 

Out of It This Week

  • by

Yeah, we’ve got a house guest this week, hailing from Mexico, it’s the Swine Flu, or at least that’s what the triage nurse says. Other than being really tired and really sore, I apparently have… 

A few WordPress sites you might not have seen…

  • by

I’ve had a few launches recently and a few of them are worth mentioning. The Afternic Domainer’s Advantage – this is a knowledge center for use by Domainers, which is fully integrated with the AfternicDLS.com… 

WordPress 2.8.5 Released

  • by

A new WordPress release came out last night. Unlike the previous, this is what they are calling “a hardening release”, i.e. it is generally designed to make the code base more secure, but doesn’t fix…