Is Murdoch’s Microsoft Bing fling really ill-fated?

It’s tempting to skewer Rupert Murdoch’s recent romance with Microsoft and its infant search engine, Bing. The fact is Murdoch, like just about anyone else around the globe who has built a business by pushing print-based magazines and newspapers, is recognizing that properties like the Wall Street Journal will continue to hemorrhage readers and ad pages and that the future for big media is and will remain Internet-driven.

Murdoch is talking to Microsoft to find out just how much Bing will pay him to map his content directly to Bing, and at the same time, restrict access by Google’s news crawler. In other words, a Google search for Wall Street Journal content would show no results at all, but would be abundant on the little-known and little-used Bing.

 

Critics rightfully point to immediate flaws with the venture. First off, reports show that about 25% of site traffic for the Wall Street Journal is derived from Google searches. If Murdoch cuts ties with Google, he would not only lose that traffic but would be forced to cut ad rates due to the fact that fewer eyeballs will be viewing the Journal’s content.

 

Murdoch continues to be painted as a guy who is accustomed to getting his way and using iron-fisted tactics to control the distribution channels of “his” content.

The latest dalliance with Microsoft is simply a further reflection of a bullying media titan trying to leverage a threatened deal to extract more value - and cash -  from Google search, critics argue.

 

The problem with this logic is the basic assumption that Google will – now and forever – possesses a strangle-hold over the viewing options of the web-visiting public. There seems to be no room for consideration that Microsoft could well engineer a series of news aggregation deals with say, business news publishers, and in the process develop a niche content specialization that would suit the well-defined needs of a well-heeled web-using demographic.

 

The heft of Microsoft should be considered. If there were any company on earth that would go to all ends of the earth to slowly, painfully chew away at market share, I would put Steve Ballmer’s firm up at the top. Getting most people to use Bing instead of Google is obviously a monumental undertaking, and I never said it would be easy.

 

Murdoch is potentially putting all his faith in the WSJ brand on the table, wagering that devotion to the brand and the exclusivity the brand extols will win a different kind of loyalty, perhaps deeper and more meaningful than what exists currently.

 

In other words, Murdoch may be branded a “digital migrant” who just doesn’t speak the language of the “digital natives” running the show at Google and therefore is woefully disadvantaged. But I say, give him a shot and see what his pioneering inspires among other publishers. It’s healthy and it’s necessary. People may love Google for its convenience, but the awesome domination of one content gatekeeper should be in a sense -  troubling – after all the ICT industry knows well the perils of overt marketplace control.