What Little I Know…

Microsoft, especially over the past few years, has been on overdrive in their quest to remain relevant and a viable competitor to search giant Google and many other best in breed online providers, for that matter. Through the route of acquisitions and strategic partnerships, Microsoft has kept up, however remedial, in many of the sought after online vertical disciplines. Most recently, we see that Microsoft is trying their hand at strategy when it comes to online content and indexing newspaper sites. This is quite the argumentative point as we’ve seen AP and most recently Rupert Murdoch, stake their claims in the argument against Google benefiting from their content, in an “unfriendly” way (so they say).  So, it is no surprise that Microsoft has chosen now to capitalize on the “Google is stealing” mantra and offer to pay publishers for the right to use/index their content. The proposal by Microsoft includes the prerequisite of newspapers de-indexing their content, from Google.

As to how plausible it will be that Microsoft will be able to commit the dollars it needs to encourage newspapers to delist with Google, is questionable. Furthermore, if Microsoft thinks this play will force Google’s hand and lead them down the path of paying for news content, they are sadly mistaken. Google’s strength doesn’t rely on their ability to serve up content from newspaper sites and the last we checked, newspaper search terms represented less than 5 per cent of the searches performed on Google. With all of the data we’ve been able to collect, we believe that newspaper publishers, if thinking about how best to drive traffic to their Web properties, will find it hard to de-index their content from Google. The very fact that Google’s search share is on the rise month after month and is ahead of all other search players by monumental measures, leads me to think that there will not be a mass Google de-indexing movement in the publishing world.

Not surprisingly, one of the publishing groups that Microsoft has been talking to is Murdoch’s News Corp and according to Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer, “The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not reads one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable traffic to us… the economic impact is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.” I caution other publishers to not be as casual with their thinking about the impact of Google to their online traffic, as every visit counts when working on ways to monetize your digital properties. Most importantly, it is reported that Google represents about 30% of search referrals to newspaper sites.  Can a publisher really afford to change their digital value proposition by that much, when they already find it difficult to monetize digital appropriately?