Murdoch says he is going paid content, now don't spider my content!? [Updated 2nd Dec 09]
02/12/09: UPDATE: As usual, things move very quickly things online: The latest moves on this subject is that Microsoft *may* be offering to pay news publishers to exclude Google Robots in favour of only listing on Bing. I'm not sure I'd be too happy about that!?
In reaction, Google are now going to allow publishers to restrict the amount of news they list. Whilst all these weird content restrictions go on, the BBC have are going the other way by breaking with tradition and vastly increase the number of characters they show in their news headlines in order to optimise SEO to improve indexing!
So, there is certainly a revolt afoot and it remains to be seen which way things will go, but I remember when I first launched ITProPortal.com in 1999 where we started indexing content from other tech sites and linking back to them (just as Google News does today). At the time I received several cease and desist notices from key publishing houses, some of who later came back to us to partner or ask us to index their content?! The world has a habit of repeating itself. In this case, my predicition is that a few will try to master online subscriptions, most will fail and some will win and when there are winners, many more will follow.....
17/11/09: Now I'm an old school media type of guy. My first job was on Electronic Times, back in 1986 and I carried on working in print, Radio and TV until I moved towards online in 1996-7. I guess a life long love for computers (my first being a Sinclair ZX-81) was a big influence. I started Net Communities in 1999 not knowing how big the internet was going to be. I sincerely did not start this business because there was a "dot-com-boom", I was focused on the idea of bringing media online. However, now I'm grateful that online advertising is now the largest advertising sector in the UK and that Net Communities sits at the top of that sector by leading the market in Tech advertising.
10 years on since I launched Net Communities, I am still flabbergasted by the attitude of old school media towards online. Many print publishers still don't have a good online presence and are losing out to newer more nimble businesses. And Mr Murdoch's views completely throw me!
First he said that he was going paid subscription, which may work to a certain extent, if he find an even balance between free distributed content paid content, however, now he says he wants to block spiders using robots.txt!? Surely this is madness.... This post is a very interesting view on how much traffic he may lose in the US if he goes ahead.
We may all be proved wrong, but we now live in a connected world, surely if you lock 5 of the 10 doors to your shop, you are going to lose customers and revenue, even if you put the price of your goods up? I guess time will tell! Good luck Mr Murdoch....
