News Corp. needs an “Internet 101″ class

August 6, 2009

Apparently one of the world’s largest media organisations still doesn’t understand how the internet works. The Inquisitr is reporting that News Corp is preparing to sue Google and Yahoo in a bid to prevent them from linking to News Corp. content. So; News Corp can’t monetise their news sites to the extent they’d like, and somehow this is Google’s fault?  Take a look at the screen-grab, below:

All of the items in the Top Stories section link off to their respective source sites. This might come as a shock to Mr Murdoch, but the Times isn’t my homepage; nor is the Sun. If it wasn’t for their headlines appearing on Google News on iGoogle, which is my homepage, I wouldn’t ever need to visit those sites. What else do you notice? No ads. Google aren’t monetising this page, which is another reason to question how this hurts News Corp.

Rather than look at them as some kind of competition, News Corp need to see Google and Yahoo as a (and I apologise for the 1990’s AOL reference) portal into their own content. Let Google send me to your site, and when I’m there, give me content compelling enough to make me stick around. To make matters worse, News Corp’s chief, Rupert Murdoch, has gone on record to say that “we intend to charge for all our news websites“. In the face of falling readership and advertising revenue for their physical media business, the last thing News Corp wants to be doing is putting a pay wall around their web-based content. There will always be other, free places to get the news; if not News Corp’s direct competitors, then smaller, feisty startups like BNO. Today, some of those news sources lack authority, compared to the News Corp sites; as pay walls go up, that will change.

If you were in charge of this multibillion dollar, international news and media organisation, what would you do? Does putting a pay wall around the web-based news content seem like a smart play, or are there better ways to monetise?

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