Murdoch's Microsoft Madness

Following on from my last post, this news comes hot on the heels of that.

While I understand, and almost commend Rupert Murdoch for his continued attempts to make money from online content, I think he's missing the point a bit.

Firstly, Bing is quite possibly the most horrible search engine to ever grace the world wide web. Bing sprang up from the ruins of msn's search, which itself was hideous and irritating to use. There are few, if any people who use it as a search engine of preference, and so his target market is far smaller than could otherwise be reached.

This would then, of course, react on the advertising rates News International could charge (lose about a quarter of your readers - online or in print) and your advertisers will notice, and not be so keen to part with large volumes of cash.

Therefore, any agreement Murdoch were to strike with Bing would need to be big enough to cover these losses BEFORE making a profit. However, he then procceds to shoot himself in the foot by saying: "If they (Microsoft) were to pay everybody for everything they took, from every newspaper in the world and every magazine they wouldn't have any profits left."

Nothing like identifying your market and knowing how to extract as much from tham as possible is there?

Microsoft obviously hopes that by simply sticking a few bits of "exclusive" news content on their site, people will flock there in their droves.
The problem being that if Bing is to promote the stories at the top of their pages (rather like sponsored current links) how many people really pay attention to those, or trust that the content being provided there if trustworthy and impartial.

This point maybe the only potential victory for Murdoch in this plan. It's far more likely that people would simply go direct to the newspaper website - or even miss it altogether.

Like it or not, we are addicted to Google. Not because of it's huge marketing budget, or it's recognisable brand, but because it actually works. When you search for something, it pretty well gets you it straight away.

This is something Bing can't compete with and, sooner or later, Murdoch will have to admit he can't either.