What is Rupert Murdoch up to?

Posted by Ken Davis - under News 2 Comments

Over the past week there has been a bit of buzz online about Rupert Murdoch’s plans for the future of News Limited’s websites. In a recent interview with Sky News, Rupert said he was thinking about removing his websites from Google and placing his news articles behind a paywall, available only to subscribers of his websites.

The main reason he gave for this was because he felt that there was very little value for the websites (and their advertisers) gained from visitors coming via a search on Google to News Limited websites. He claimed that visitors from Google would click through to an article, read it and leave. If this is true, perhaps it speaks volumes about the websites content, or usability. Perhaps they could benefit from some multivariate testing and a redesign?

But that’s not what’s got my curious mind spinning. Murdoch only seemed to mention Google in his interview. If Google traffic is of such poor quality, why does News Limited competitively spend to get traffic from Google? See in the screengrab of the search below, where I searched for “Australian News” - www.news.com.au (a News LTD website) appears second in the paid listing. News Limited is actually paying for Google traffic!

Could Murdoch be trying to wedge Google? After all, now is the best time. Microsoft is spending big trying to reposition its new search engine “Bing” (having just recently announced deals with Twitter and Facebook). Perhaps Murdoch will withdraw from Google, switch to a subscriber model and then strike a lucrative search deal with Bing, forcing Google to put money on the table for access.

It’s interesting to see how this all plays out.