Understanding News Corp’s Thrust

There has been a lot of commentary written about News Corp playing with the idea of exiting Google’s search index. Cringely said that News Corp would be denying themselves valuable traffic, handing them to competitors. Mark Cuban, on the other wrote that Twitter is heading to be THE news search site, leaving Google News has little impact.

Both these comments misunderstand Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch doesn’t care about news.

He cares about loyalty and eye balls. Listen carefully to Murdoch’s interview on Sky News.

On visitor loyalty

It is about “News You can Trust”, not “News You can Trust”. Hence, the bundling of Fox News with operators like Hannity and Beck. In doing so, Fox becomes the destination because Fox validates what their visitors already believed in, and hands out new corroborating facts every day.

For those people who don’t read the news, there is Myspace. A site that again appeals to the narcissist by reminding them how important they were to the rest of the world.

On eye-balls

The visitor from Google does not stay on their property because visiting from aggregator sites do not instill a rabid following. These types of visitors are of low value.

Rupert wants the old days back, when you paid your dollar for the paper, the paper holds you captive for the rest of the day. Advertising is sold on the circulation numbers x number of pages on newspaper. This is different from selling advertising on CPM basis, since one page-view lacks the multiplier effect of “number of pages on the newspaper”. A once-only web visitor is only worth a fraction of the advertising dollars.

To get the old days back, one has to recognize that the desire for deep news is merely another compulsion. People have got by in the past without them. Since there is no way News Corp can own all the coverage for a particular news item, it is necessary for them to either cut off the fuel from aggregator sites, or to own one themselves. Through their experiments with Fox, they have shown that it is not necessary for opinions to be separated from facts, hence the positioning of Fox as a cross of Huffington Post and CNN – Newstertainment at its finest.

What next for News Corp

Firstly, after walling off News Corp articles from Google’s indexes, reorganize news content around visitor profiles than news similarity. Instead of listing similar news articles alongside a piece of news, for instance instead of listing news of other shooting beside the Fort Hood shooter, News might link to articles on radical Islam, or Barack Obama is a Muslim. There is a little narcissist in every one. While the visitor profile to Washington Post may be different, they are no less obsessive about their own world-views.

Secondly, prove to other news proprietors that a paywall works. News may be free, but causes aren’t. By taking a hardline position on a set of issues, News Corp can extract more rent than a politician can.

Thirdly, use a paywall to cognitively engender value, and hence extract more page-views. If one has paid $1 for the day’s news, one is more likely to stay on the news property to read everything else that is there. In truth, $1 a day is cheap entertainment. The poor showing at Myspace has been ostensibly due to the ever-increasing web inventory pushing down advertising rates. However, it appears that someone used his playbook better.

So, is Rupert Murdoch a Narcissist?

No. But the rest of us are. And he consistently shows how wrong we are about the narcissists inside us.