After bribing Murdoch to get News Corp. content removed from Google, Microsoft should bring the battle to the next level by paying everybody to use Bing instead of Google. I’m pretty sure that by thinking hard enough, Microsoft managers are going to find a way to monetize on this novelty. I can hear Microsoft VP explaining the plan: “First, we pay people to use Bing. Then, we sell keywords in auctions. Those who pay more are on top of search pages. We just gotta make sure we give a fraction of what we collect to our users”.
Google is nothing without the web
I’m going to make an analogy with social media: would anyone use Facebook if it didn’t have any member? I guess the answer is an obvious no. Indeed, the hard reality for any site that has user generated content is that its value is based on the number of users that interact with it. Search engines are also a kind of user-generated websites where the whole World Wide Web is the content. Without any website to crawl and index, search engines would be useless.
The effects of News Corp. blocking Google
Having websites to index a must for search engines, but having quality content to index is also very important. After all, people don’t wanna find trash when they spend their time searching. In this regard, Murdoch’s move to remove its content from Google is very hurtful to the search giant. News Corp. has a very respectable reader-base where only 20% of their readers come from Google. Being backed by the 20/80 rule, News Corp. asked itself a crucial question.
Google can make you lose traffic
It is true that News Corp. gains visitors when they are referred by Google. On the other hand, they will lose all those visitors that are referred to other news sites and that never end-up on News Corp. Let’s say you search for “stock market today” and that the WSJ is not within the first 5 links. Well, if the WSJ has a good article about “stock market today”, then you are not going to read it unless you directly visit the WSJ. Therefore, Murdoch is raising an important question: would News Corp. get more pageviews if it wasn’t indexed on Google?
I don’t think anybody beside News Corp web analystics team could answer the question without speculating. Still, something should be taken in consideration here: if the Wall Street Journal has quality content that is worth reading and that this content doesn’t show up on Google, then people will have to take the habit of going to the WSJ so they don’t miss good articles. Therefore, by blocking Google, Murdoch might actually increase the number of regular readers and maybe overall pageviews.
How much is Microsoft paying?
Why should Microsoft be the one that has the right to index News Corp? Since Murdoch thinks that News Corp. is better off without Google, it is going to think the same about Microsoft. Therefore, Murdoch will let Microsoft crawl its website only if it pays the difference between traffic News Corp loses because of being indexed and the traffic it gains because of being indexed, that is the difference between loyal visitors and occasional visitors. You can bet it is a lot.
What about me?
Well, now that News Corp. gets a piece of the action, Microsoft should step up and pay us to use Bing. I mean Google is definitely a better search engine that Microsoft. Why should Microsoft be the search engine I use? Because they have the WSJ indexed? I don’t think so.