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.