The discussion in the tech/media blogs this weekend is Rupert Murdoch’s comment:
we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked the News Corp
chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The
answer, said Murdoch, should be, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ “
Ian Betteridge has a good post on this and says:
I
agree with Ian that Rupert is as smart and sophisticated as they come
and he has thought this through. But unfortunately for Rupert and News
Corp and other newspaper owners, you can’t take your toys and go home
on this one.
News Corp can easily block Google from crawling its
pages at the WSJ, NY Post, and elsewhere. They can also sue Google and
litigate for a rev share or whatever else it is that Rupert wants from
Google.
But here’s the thing. Google is distribution. It is the
newsstand. If Rupert or any other newspaper owner chooses to take its
content out of the Google index, there will be plenty of content left
that can take its place.
Look at the top of the page on Google finance right now:
On
Friday, an asian online games company called ChangeYou went public here
in the US and had a very successful offering. This is interesting to me
on many levels as you might imagine. Google shows three stories on the
ChangeYou IPO; the lead story from SeekingAlpha, a story from Forbes,
and a story from the FT. Note that there is no story there from the WSJ.
And I could care less. I had the option of all three links and I selected the SeekingAlpha link. SeekingAlpha is a network of stock bloggers. It is slowly but surely building a brand as a trusted source of stock news and opinion.
Google
is not News Corp’s problem. Their problem is us. We know a lot. But we
don’t own a printing press. And that’s a good thing. Because printing
presses are expensive. But we do own a computer and many blogging
services are free. The explosion of “user generated content” has
created some very compelling news services in all sorts of verticals.
Not just tech, but finance, fashion, music, travel, lifestyle, and on
and on. And there are a bunch of companies like Seeking Alpha that are
aggregating up the best user generated content in verticals and
creating awesome news, information, and entertainment services.
Steven Johnson, the popular author and founder of our portfolio company Outside.in put it very well in his keynote at SXSW last month.
What’s happened with technology and politics is happening elsewhere
too, just on a different timetable. Sports, business, reviews of
movies, books, restaurants – all the staples of the old newspaper
format are proliferating online. There are more perspectives; there is
more depth and more surface now. And that’s the new growth. It’s only
started maturing.
More
perspectives is the most important thing of all. News and information
content is becoming much richer and better. And that is Rupert problem
at the end of the day. It’s not that he can’t compete with Google. It’s
that he can’t compete with us.
(For more from Fred, visit his blog)
(Image source: thenyrm.com)
