Damiansen.com

Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul that owns News Corp (Fox, Sky, myspace and others…) dropped a bomb today saying he is considering to block Google’s access to his websites. This may well be the beginning of a big change on the Web.

A trend observed on Google’s behaviour and Twitter may have triggered this. Murdoch doesn’t want to block Google but to sell access to his content instead. The timing is nothing more than perfect.

Murdoch’s move

Murdoch is aware that he controls the second largest media conglomerate of the world. That’s a lot of content online. Murdoch is aware the the movement toward free (or very cheap) on the web is forcing his content to be less valuable. But Murdoch also knows that probably 3-50% of traffic on his site is originated by Google: so why this move?

Google’s being a bit hevil’ish

Google has been mashing up their products with more and more content. Google news for instance  has short summaries of the news and some people don’t really want to read the long version of the news. Google is then moving up on the “supply chain” of content by providing the same as the next guy when considering user experience and flow. This is extremely dangerous to content providers.

and then Twitter sold his content to Google and Bing

Twitter recently announced that they sold access to their real-time content to Bing and Google. This is a big thing because they were able to sell content to google, when before companies thought Google was an added value to their site. When Twitter’s content has it value due to the fact that it is real-time, Murdoch is taking advantage that he owns a lot of the valuable content of the web.

What if Bing had access to it but Google didnt?

Meanwhile Bing, an alternative Search Engine from Microsoft,  is winning some market share to google. If both become some kind of duopoly, content will be king again and drive the war. Why? Because guys like Murdoch can make a partnership with Bing while blocking Google access to it.

Murdoch doesn’t want to block google. Murdoch want to sell access to their content to Google, and is bargaining on a unique time on the web where finally demand (Search Engines) is  starting to leverage the existing supply (content).

Murdoch is freaking smart and probably very well advised by some good people behind him.

Jason Calacanis discussed this precise issue with a guest recently and it makes all sense.