Okay, so I don’t usually bash people on here, unless of course their name is Rupert Murdoch. In the past I have bashed Murdoch for saying things like, The Internet is Going Away, and People Will Pay for News, but his latest plan might be just the thing Fox and all of his other News Corp entities need to become completely irrelevant.
Murdoch’s latest stroke of genius is to have all of his News Corp websites invisible to Google’s search engine. That’s right, you won’t be able to find Fox headlines in Google’s search engines anymore. That should do wonders for his web traffic (insert sarcasm here). I honestly can’t wait to see how this turns out for him…
It’s long been common knowledge, even to those who work alongside him in the industry that he has no clue as to how news is disseminated today, and has an even fuzzier grasp on the whole social media phenomenon that has taken root and forever changed the way we use the web today.
Here are just a few profound statements from Rupert recently that should make you wonder if this guy just woke up from being cryonically frozen alongside Ted Williams. When asked about removing his content from Search Engines, here was a few of his responses:
“I think we will. But that’s when we’ll start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get the first paragraph of any story but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com, you get a paragraph and a subscription form.”
By the way Rupert, you are misinformed as to your own business model dude, The Wall Street Journal isn’t hidden from Google, you can easily find WSJ articles on Google, maybe not all of them, but a lot.
I think Mashable put it best when they said Mr. Murdoch is not ready to accept any of the changes brought forth by the Internet and the social media movement. Moreover, he doesn’t seem to understand how some parts of it work. He’s got the manpower to announce a war, but I’m afraid his army will be fighting windmills.
In case you haven’t seen the Interview that Murdoch did recently with Sky News, pop some popcorn, grab a beverage of your choosing, invite some friends over, and enjoy this comedy:
For some more perspective on this story, Mashable did a great piece on it: http://mashable.com/2009/11/09/rupert-murdoch-google/
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