Do you live in the 'Bot-infested Badlands' ?

News Corp announced last week revenues of $2.18bn for the last 3 months of 2017. But aside from the 3% year-on-year improvement, the biggest headline grabbing phrase was reserved for CEO Robert Thomson describing the dysfunctional digital environment as "The bot-infested badlands".

This is clearly him positioning his brands as the quality online publishers and the opposite of the digital locations that are "hardly a safe space for advertisers, whose brands are being tainted by association with the extreme, the violent and the repulsive".

https://newscorpcom.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/q2-2018-press-release_final_02-08-2018-1230pm.pdf

Murdoch upset with Facebook again

The billionaire publisher is once more annoyed at Facebook for making money promoting newspapers' content.
So unsurprisingly he demands even more money.

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/22/rupert-murdoch-facebook-should-pay-news-publishers

“If Facebook wants to recognize ‘trusted’ publishers then it should pay those publishers a carriage fee similar to the model adopted by cable companies,” 

News Corp Blames Digital Again

News Corp's CEO Robert Thomson has been out attacking Google, Facebook and Linkedin once more, this time accusing them of "Kleptocracy, Piracy and Zealotry".

Yes, the organisation that: breaks into voicemail, publishes fiction as truth and plays politics with its publications...has claimed that online social networks are spammers that help themselves to content without paying for it.

He also publicly stated that “The words Intellectual Property don’t appear in the Google alphabet."- but far be it for me to tell a journalist that you can make any words from the alphabet.

Thomson went on to further attack the new media sector by saying "None of them actually create content, and they certainly have little intention of paying for it, but they do redistribute the content created by others – they would argue that such redistribution is a natural extension of their role as social networks. I would argue that much of the redistribution is an unnatural act”

All this smacks of hypocrisy... especially given News Corp in 2005 bought MySpace, then a leading social network that in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the USA... before watching over its decline and its sale in 2011 for less than 8% of its purchase price.

Also... given that News Corp has only recently decided to change the direction of its WSJ and Dow Jones publishing sector to focus on digital media efforts and that its own Social News Agency Storyful is responsible for finding and redistributes news stories (and apparently hiding Rebekah Brooks in their offices)... methinks they need to keep their insults to themselves.

Full story here:
http://mumbrella.com.au/news-corp-ceo-lashes-google-for-piracy-zealotry-and-kleptocracy-at-lowy-institute-event-312252 

News, a business model problem

I've previously mentioned that "We may eventually find that the profitable running of a newspaper was a failed experiment!". The thought being that we may one day look back at the big print media barons and see that, just because they were at the time operating in an imperfect economy (where information was not globally and freely available), that they never had a long term commercially viable product.


Or as Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a keynote speech to open the annual conference of the American Society of News Editors back in April:

"We have a business model problem; we don't have a news problem" http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20002227-93.html

However only yesterday, research released from online measurement company Hitwise gave a good indication that the paywall finally put up around the Times newspaper website is having a negative affect on its readership (its currently only requiring people to register to see content, charging is expected to happen towards the end of July).

This is hardly a surprise.... if you insist on registering users, you will affected visitor traffic. The question is whether loyal Times readers will pay for the opportunity from next month. Or vote with their virtual feed and migrate to other popular newspaper sites.

Schmidt may have claimed in his speech that newspapers were "fundamental" to democracy, but he also predicted that they would need to come up with new business models based on advertising and subscriptions.

I wonder which business model historians of the future will say was the correct one?

The Times Online annouces its paywall

News International, owner of the The Times and Sunday Times newspapers has announced that its paywall in June, only a few months away.

Following a relaunch of both online properties in May and a period of free usage to registered customers (presumably to build up the potential user base) users will then pay £1 for a single day and £2 for weekly site access . However no further details of other site subscriptions have been main available as-yet (e.g. Quarterly or Yearly).

Further questions are obviously going to be answered as this date draws nearer, such as will the sites continue to support advertising alongside articles or do so in such an overt manner?

The fact remains that there are a number of other alternatives all watching to see: if Mr Murdoch's plan will work, if the same monetisation scheme is applied to other NewsCorp properties and if their own site traffic rises as a consequence.

Here's a link to the article on The Times Online, although please note that from June it will cost you a £1/$2/€1.5 to read it!
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article7076987.ece

More News International sites block aggregator

Following on from my post last Friday explaining how News International started blocking the news aggregation site www.newsnow.com, word is now out that other Murdoch-owned sites are following suit.

As revealed yesterday by PaidContent, The Sun and News Of The World were planning to block the search spider of NewsNow. However this has already started and The Sun's site has already implemented this change (Hat tip to Malcolm Coles for checking the robots.txt file on thesun.co.uk and getting proof)

There is still no reason given by NewsCorp on why NewsNow has been singled out for this treatment. Perhaps this is just the proof-of-concept before more search engines are excluded from their sites. NewsCorp may be looking at the effects on their organic search results and traffic as a consequence of excluding just one player in the news aggregation space......

News International starts blocking search engine spiders....

.... but only the ones it can afford to set its lawyers on.

Today we have had a further development in the ongoing battle between news aggregators and Rupert Murdoch's News International company. In fact its one that aggregator NewsNow has felt strongly enough to issue a Press Release about today.

For those who aren't familiar with NewsNow's service, it spiders news sites in a similar way to other search sites such a Yahoo and Google News. It then builds links to these articles from its own site, thereby sending traffic off to the content it finds (helping them build visitor traffic, which sells more adverts, which makes the sites more money).

News International has previously stated that it will delist itself from search engines in 2010. We're all watching for them to make themselves invisible to the search spiders of Google and others (but not Bing.com, assuming News International and Microsoft get into bed together as rumoured).

So as I've stated before, the easy way to do this is to make changes to a simple file called a robots.txt which sits on the server displaying the content. If you use this file to tell the spider not to index the specific site it won't, its as simple as that. You can even go so far as to tell the spider (e.g. Google's Googlebot) that you specifically don't want it to look through all or part of your site.
I have done this in the past when I've had a particularly fragile site that could not take all its pages being indexed at once and some site owners do this when they don't want their content read & stolen... which is fair enough.

So what have The Time Online done? Well, if you look at their robots.txt file you will see that they have entered the line:

#Agent Specific Disallowed Sections
User-agent: NewsNow
Disallow: /

Now for those who don't speak fluent search engine spider, I'll translate...

"Dear NewsNow spider, go away"

I'll leave you to decide if The Times are playing fair in this matter. However NewsNow's boss Struan Bartlett is fairly clear on the matter:

“The question remains whether News International, in arbitrarily blocking individual search engines, is trying to use its muscle to gain unreasonable control over the public’s freedom to choose the way they access information and news online."

I personally want to know why The Times has not done the same to block the Googlebot. Could it be it brings in far too much reveue for them right now?

The battle continues!

How to get yourself delisted from search engines

With all this talk about NewsCorp delisting from Google early in 2010, I thought I'd get my thoughts straight on how it is possible to do this:

There are two main ways to ensure that your site doesn't appear in search engines:

1. Use a lot of underhand Search Engine Opimisation techniques
   This 'blackhat' activity will get your website delisted quickly and with a chance your URL may never reappear in the listings!


2. Tell the search engine spiders not to visit
   What? Yes, you can tell all the major search engines that you don't want all or part of your site spidered & indexed. Its called a robots.txt file and it sits in the root directory of your website.
   Note: This isn't an exactly new thing done by Google, Robots.txt was devised in 1994... two years before Google was even incorporated.

So why, if Mr Murdoch has been threatening to delist his properties from every search engine (apart from those he wants to do a deal with) why hasn't he just got his Tech people to make this simple change and instantly get removed?
Note: This is even something Google took some time earlier in the year to point out how to do.

Newspapers, an epic fail

At the beginning of 2009 I mentioned an animation called EPIC, that put forward a view of the future in 2015 where Google and the New York Times went head-to-head in an (errrr... Epic) battle.
Note: I actually found out subsequently via Wikipedia that the movie was made by the Museum of Media History and was originally produced in 2004 and subsequently updated in 2005.

We have witnessed a crumbling newspaper business model, once based upon near-monopolistic retail and classified adverts. And those 'golden days' just aren't likely to make a comeback (ever). Well in 2009 this animation took another step towards becoming realised.

Advertising revenues along with readership numbers have dropped further and so have the profits & staff of those papers along with them. The only difference worth pointing out is that the battle this year wasn't taken up by the New York Times - as suggested in EPIC, but by News Corp (owners of the Wall Street Journal).

And now even some of those papers that state their readership is rising aren't selling more newspapers. Apparently since April 1 2009 there have been new auditing rules in the USA that have made it easier for newspapers to count a reader as a paying customer... by counting both their print and digital subscriptions to the same person as two readers! (The Huffington Post explains further here)

But the decentralising of information from newspapers and their mainstream media owners, to millions of the general populace with the ability to publish for free, is just the tip of the iceberg.

What were are really hinting at here is the decentralising of power... and for some that is an opportunity (those prepared to understand and embrace digital democratisation) whilst to others it is a threat (old media owners and those who used the media to control and restrict thought & opinion).

News Corp vs Google is merely a battle...

... the war is between old and new.

To quote Mark Sigal from O'Reilly

Analog (old) media is all about managing scarcity by controlling distribution

whereas

Digital (new) media. ... content, in tandem with un-tethered distribution and pretty good search/retrieval functions, operates in complete disregard for the old media-based pricing models that preceded it

And as we know, when they meet.... the results are very disruptive!

Its therefore an analog vs. digital fight we are in the midst of. Up until now, digital has won over the protectionist activities of 20th Century analog-based business models.

The hard-fought battlegrounds have been:

• music
  A clear win to digital, where iTunes and the MP3 format were the tank and gunpowder
  
• small ads
  Another clear win to digital, with a soldier called Craig and the mighty eBay the victors
  
• radio
  A draw, where radio has been allowed to live (but limp in its damaged vehicle with a license that could expire at any time in the future)

But.... the war is getting closer and closer to the centre-piece of the analog media's territory.... television. So the analogs have drawn their line of battle , along the far-reaching fields of newspaper control.

It is here they have decided to stand and attack back, to preserve what they have and fight one last and (possibly) long battle... or risk losing everything (AKA: mainly the value of their shareholdings in their companies).

Is delisting from Google a financial model?

I've recently mentioned the Forrester report that states that 80% of Internet users would not bother to pay for newspaper content online. Yet the belief at News Corp is that there is still a model to be had from sticking up a pay wall and hiding your content from Google (and charging Microsoft for the privilege of displaying your content).

Perhaps this is the "rewriting the economics of newspaper" that James Harding, Editor of The Times talked about last week? Here he talked about charging a fee for a 24 hour view of the newspaper online (figures of around £1 have been mentioned, but obviously an annual subscription would be less than this).

But is there a possible financial model to had from de-listing from Google? Well... Bill Tancer at Hitwise has done this work, albeit taking just one News Corp newspaper as an example... The Wall Street Journal.

His findings are that although WSJ.com gets over 15% of its traffic from normal search (which quite possibly isn't that valuable to Mr Murdoch, as this is predominately brand searches, not searches for content), it gets 11% of its traffic from Google News. Now that must surely contribute to 11% of all landing page advertising inventory and any successive page that the visitor then moves onto?

So.... unless Bing can provide this sort of replacement revenue to News Corp.... how are they hoping to make more money (not less) from de-listing from Google and going to a Bing-only search engine model?

Obviously the answer is they are hoping to make further money from their paywall subscriptions. Although the WSJ may need to seriously consider whether its readers will be happy about paying for their paper and well as having to deal with intrusive/distracting in-page advertising.

And now proof of the UK paywall model for local content is about to be put to the test. Today, news has surfaced that local newspaper publisher Johnston Press will start an experiment to charge for access to its weekly websites from next week, although they have yet to announce they are de-listing their content from Google.

What would delisting news from Google mean?

With the battle between News Corp and Google (in reality the whole of the open web) now warming up, thanks to Murdoch and Microsoft getting cosy, it is perhaps prudent to take a look at exactly the impact that delisting news sites from Google would have.

This is exactly what a German investigation unearthed when looking at what the effect on Google.de would be if most of the country’s publishers delisted their content from it.
The results found:

five percent of the top 10 (Google search) results came from the news organisations - and this is with publishers co-operating with Google.

It is therefore likely that the effect on Google would be minimal and the content gap would simply be filled by other news sources. This would especially true if it was only News Corp content unavailable to the whole web and put it behind a paywall or available via Bing.com

News Corp and the battle to charge for content

Its been several months now since Rupert Murdoch told a press conference that he planned on charging for his papers by next June. However, he has recently informed those that will listen that this deadline may not be likely any more.

However, this battle to make content on newspaper sites such as The Times and The Sun chargeable, looks like its dragging in other media players....well, it has to, or else the existence of free news elsewhere will mean that most people simply won't visit news sites if it costs them.

First it was The Telegraph group that Murdoch indicated that he was in discussions with, when he told a Telegraph journalist (who surprisingly didn't report this slip) what he was up to.
Note: As Alan Greenslade points out, I'm sure its more than a little anti-competitive to have discussions with your opposition, as well as being somewhat foolhardy to admit to it for all regulatory bodies to hear.

Now it looks like Rupert is talking with Microsoft in the hope that Steve Bulmer will pay him money for his content if he removes it from Google listings.
Note:
As so many web commentators have pointed out... It is extremely easy to de-list all News Corp content from Google, by sticking a small file containing a single line of code on each website. But surprisingly, despite calling Google names (he's obviously run out of sticks & stones this year, perhaps after losing so much on MySpace)... this instant change hasn't been done. Perhaps News Corp, even temporarily needs Google!)

Yes, soon Bing could contain News Corp's lovely content. This could increase its share of the search engine market and now giving it potentially more tabloid news to display in local searches. I can't wait!

Newspapers and their pay walls

Is news really worth paying for?

Well, unsuprisingly one newspaper bosses think it is, but unfortunately readers and other journalists think otherwise.

Now, as many people know, hiding news content to readers (unless they are charged for it), is known as using a paywall and Mr Rupert Murdoch (who is some chap who owns a company called NewCorp - a company that took a $3.4 billion net loss in 2008, down from net income of $5.4 billion in 2007) thinks that this will make him some money. Well... he's correct.

So... how will they actually charge for this service? Well one way would be to have a subscription service such as the economist website and the other one is to use Micro-payments (e.g via a service such as http://bitcents.com/)

Putting up a pay wall for the New York Times or The (London) Times WILL make some money. But will it kill off his online readership (and therefore his small but constant advertising revenue) in the process? Quite possibly!

There are a lot of industry observers such as myself who think this will fail, most notable including Steve Outing, who shows statistical evidence from the USA that newspaper execs "remain delusional about how charging for online content"

But its not just observers who think this is a bad idea [bad joke: its also Observers]

Emily Bell from the Guardian, back in August said

No – we are not contemplating a pay wall, nor as far as I’m concerned would we ever….they are a stupid idea in that they restrict audiences for largely replicable content. Murdoch no doubt will find this out – even rudimentary maths suggests he will struggle with a completely free model to meet advertising revenue levels across the NI offerings.

And even Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that is is unlikely that a paywall model will work because news content is now so ubiquitous across the web.

Time will tell.....