Rupert Murdoch threatens to screw Google and live forever!

My mate, The Cartoonist points out that the Wizened of Oz has decided he is going to fuck Google by removing all his newspaper content from the search engine when he erects pay walls to his on-line sites. Why anyone apart from teabaggers and other assorted lunatics would want to pay for the shit News Corp puts out is beyond me! Let’s hope his move is as successful as the current Titanic of social networks… MySpace, the shitasmic site he bought for mega-millions a few years ago and which is turning into a refuge for teens too retarded to cope with Facebook. The picture in his attic gets uglier by the day, and as his real “Fizog” is not exactly a thing of beauty, lets hope he has it securely locked away.

Wendy closes hers eyes and thinks of the money!

 

Comments

[pseudo]

one thing i would pay having access to online is news wires - when it comes to news. if anyone would provide more than a subjectified write up of agencies' news feeds, i.e. in-depth, investigative quality journalism in fields i am interested in, i guess i would subscribe too. but why should i pay money for something i can get somewhere else for free? from that point of view, good luck rupert.

[The Cartoonist]

pseudo, try medialens for example (free):

http://www.medialens.org/

and also the book & website http://www.flatearthnews.net/

Recommended reading. Apart from that, you're absolutely right.

[midbest]

@pseudo @george @everyone
your dislike of the dirty digger is - i hope - blinding you to some brutal realities. Please tell me why the fuck this stuff should be free? Was it made for free? As for stuff of his people want, the Sun is the most read paper in Britain and its paid for. Someone wants it. Why is it worth something on paper and worth nothing online? The Wall Street Journal - nobody wants it, should be free?

Come on - this is just lame.Do you guys think that everything on iTunes should be free because its online?

[pseudo]

@thecartoonist thank you for the links! i guess the book deals, in broader terms, with effects of flattening which globalization has on the media. though that might not be what the author intended to mean with the title. i have to read it i suppose. ha!

@midbest i dont know rupert, so how could i dislike him. anyway, i never said everything should be free. though that would be nice. but it is utopian. i said i would pay for something i think is worth paying for. that is, dumbed down, a market principle.

[midbest]

@pseudo The only reason stuff has been free so far is a nasty hang over from the mid 90s. Remember when you could get a car for free if you drove it around with ads painted on it? When you could get stuff delivered to the office for the same cost as going to the store on the west coast!

What's worrying is the fact that everyone seems to think stuff should be free. Do you think the answer for newspapers is to make themselves be free?

[the lower depths]

price (and the willingness to pay that price) are determined by availability… if you're getting the same information from another online source that's not charging a subscription or viewing fee, would you pay for that information?

the problem that murdoch will have is like that: what does his charging people for his content get the people that are being charged that's better?

that they're paying for information is not the point, it's the value of paying for it that's the question. as long as news feeds are free (from various other sources) and they contain the same basic information, what's murdoch doing to warrant that payment?

and no, i don't believe that everything should be free (hells bells, even Woodstock wasn't free!) but i do believe that it's going to be damned difficult to charge AFTER the fact and with so much available out there (the competition) and to get people that are used to NOT paying to agree to shell out, especially in these difficult times…

[The Cartoonist]

I think it's the other way round: in fact Murdoch should pay the people to read his vile propaganda crap.

[the lower depths]

@cartoonist: this is a radical new concept in the consumer information payment paradigm!

YOU should immediately set out to meet with rupert and wendy, make your proposal and install yourself as new business dynamic executive officer…

and as consultant to this model of the future, i might require a meager 17% commission derived from all futures of this bold, visionary undertaking…

i learned from casey jones…

lol

[Dave Knockles]

I value Rupert Murdoch's contribution to the fabric of British life.

He alone - nobody else - pioneered the appearance of a woman with her tits out on page 3 of Britain's biggest tabloid.

And for that, he deserves his knighthood. Does he have a knighthood? If he doesn't, he should have.

Thank you, Rupert. Thank you for the tits.

http://iamtheclient.blogspot.com/

[pseudo]

@midbest as i said, i would pay for news wire access. it still amazes me that i can get news from reuters for free. in any case, i think that newspapers have to focus on quality journalism, and not too much on speed, because speed is likely to just make them another gatekeeper churning biased news feed write ups out. and they should sort things with google out. fast flip can be a good thing to get people to your website, maybe even to get them subscribing or paying for accessing single articles. maybe rupert is scared because fast flip offers previews? on a slightly different note... google acquires admob.

talking about free, quality, and ld mentioning a shifting payment paradigm... reminds me of crowdsourcing. whatever the reason for this might be.

@ld @thecartoonist that seems to be a proper business model. id like to join in as the pr consultant.

[adf]

Watch murduck's web properties take a nose dive when google stops linking to their content. Ha!

Maybe murduck should be paying google instead.

[bg]

"Watch murduck's web properties take a nose dive when google stops linking to their content. Ha!"

Yep. George’s latest post touches on this but yeah, it's the other part of this story. Sure content can’t always be free, but newspapers haven’t exactly been hurting from the traffic sent their way. Why is it Google’s fault that they can’t figure out a better ad model?

Search engines may be hotlinking to sources for free, but there's a reason brands spend so much on paid search: It fucking works. All the traffic that search drives to news sites, to companies, to retail?

How do these idiots think they show up on people’s radar in the first place? Free is a two-way street. (Wait until Google just “happens” to bury Murdoch in results and his competitors start appearing above him.)

What’s their attitude here, once people have to pay, they’ll just live on a given website? No way.

People search by need, not “at” or on a specific site exclusively. I live on Google. Not the NYT. (Or whatever search page you prefer.)

Rupert should focus on sensationalized content and let others worry about distribution.