Rupert the Sun King: lots of heat, not much light
Insiders at News Limited used to joke about the company’s negotiating tactics — “We stride in, boots-and-all, and shout, ‘Don’t you know who the #%^$ we are? We’re @&*^ News Corp!’ Apparently, that’s served them well for many years.
I can only assume that’s what’s to be read between the lines here, as Rupert Murdoch once again fires broadsides at what he sees as the pirates of online news revenue, Google and Yahoo!. I doubt he believes the internet industry might come round to his way of thinking surely this is just blustering and threats to reinforce the subtler negotiations being conducted privately behind closed doors.
In more than a decade, News has failed to learn a simple lesson: there’s no dabbling in this internet media thing — if you dabble, you die. If you’re going to work with internet search engines to grow your online business, withholding anything kills the consumer offering, kills the revenue and ultimately kills the deal. You’ve got to go in boots-and-all. It’s surprising that such a boots-and-all company culture can’t go boots-and-all into the future.
As Product Director for Yahoo! Australia & NZ I was responsible for managing a news content distribution deal with News’s Australian News Network (ANN) way back in 1997. I think that may have been News Corp’s first deal to licence online content of any kind to a third party. Though they barely got their shoes damp, much less went in boots-and-all.
At first, I thought we understood each other. I thought we agreed to set our differences aside, take some risks and experiment together on how to ‘monetize’ news content online.
How we did it was really very straightforward: we took short summaries of their top news stories in several categories, displayed them in a ‘co-branded’ page (Yahoo! logo on one side, The Australian News Network on the other) and did our darndest to sell banner ads on them. We even linked ANN’s logo and a short promotional tagline at the end of each story to the corresponding page on ANN’s site, so readers would be encouraged to go to click through for the full story, the photos and all the other goodness News was unwilling to share with us.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to locate an archived copy of an actual news page, but here's the news index page for yahoo.com.au showing News' ANN news stories as distributed on Yahoo!.
Unfortunately, the gap between online advertising revenue and print back then was much wider than today, and despite our best efforts to keep the relationship going, News pulled out of the deal, apparently convinced we were either not working hard enough, undervaluing their content, or both. They stormed off, boots-and-all, fists clenched, to go shout at someone else. They were convinced they didn’t need us, could go it alone.
A decade later, and nothing has really changed. Despite all the evidence to show that media publishers really can’t go it alone, News Corp is agitating to get its rivals and competitors together in a coordinated effort to force us to pay for news, whether it’s dross or not.
Sorry Rupert, as Margaret Simons says today in Crikey, if you don’t want search engines to index your content so their audience can find your news, all you have to do is insert one little snippet of code in your page templates — so simple you could probably manage the task yourself. You know and we know that you can’t afford to do that — the ad revenue News manages to earn from its own pages depends so much on traffic from the search engines it would kill your business in a year or two if you tried.
What the search engines are delivering you is marketing and distribution at no cost. What you’re really complaining about is not them ’stealing’ your news but displaying it on a search result page that also includes related news from other, competing news sources. The fact that some Google users don’t click through to read the full story on a News masthead site is due to the quality of your content and the people you pay to produce it.
News might survive without online distribution, but only if it spends less on sensationalist, populist pap media and more on hiring the best and rewarding them for quality rather than sensationalism. Producees less, at higher quality. Specialises more, engages more, goes further in-depth and covers stuff that organisations without News’ heft and resources could never hope to cover.
We know who the !^%#$ you are — you’re News Corp. And that doesn’t scare anyone anymore.
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