News Corp To Block Google Search Engine Spider? (You Heard It From Jason Calacanis First…)
By Anna Johnson on November 10th, 2009News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch has revealed that News Corp is considering blocking the Google search spider from indexing News Corp websites.
Hearing the news, I instantly thought of comments made by Jason Calacanis on his weekly online video show ‘This Week In Startups’. During the show, Jason suggested that, in light of Bing and Google likely paying Twitter to index its content, why shouldn’t the media companies also charge Google for access to their content?
Here’s the video of Jason discussing the idea:
The major media companies have increasingly complained that Google has been unfairly capitalizing on their content by, among other things, aggregating their headlines and, as a result, deterring viewers from reading the actual news stories (i.e. by clicking through to the media companies’ websites). For its part, Google has argued that the media companies have no reason to complain since they’ve benefited from having their content indexed in Google’s search engine.
So who benefits more: the media companies, who get indexed by the world’s most popular search engine with some 70-80 percent share of all searches… or Google, which gets free access to, and the ability to index, the breaking news and high quality content of the world’s leading media companies?
The answer is, of course: both. The question is, however, whether one party is benefiting more… and not paying its fair share for that benefit.
Well, one way to find out is, in fact, for the media companies to do exactly what Jason Calacanis suggested on This Week In Startups, and which, Rupert Murdoch appears willing to do: block the Google spider from all News Corp’s online content.
The big risk for News Corp is, of course, that it blocks Google and ends up with a drastic drop in traffic, while Google experiences no tangible difference to its own business.
On the other hand, News Corp could, as Jason Calacanis also suggested, do a deal with Bing whereby Bing pays for exclusive access to News Corp’s websites and effectively compensates News Corp for any (temporary?) drop in traffic.
One thing is for sure: if News Corp does block Google from indexing its sites – including everything from the Wall Street Journal, to all the Fox sites, to MySpace – things are going to get real interesting, real soon.
Oh, and if you haven’t tuned into Jason Calacanis’ This Week In Startups yet, I highly recommend you do so. Great guests, great insights, great energy, and highly entertaining too!
Source: mumBrella, “Murdoch: We’ll probably remove our sites from Google’s index”, mumBrella, November 9, 2009; Jason Calacanis, “How to kill Google (or take 10 points of search search share in six months)”, Calacanis.com, November 9, 2009
