Wednesday, 11 November 2009

Google vs. Newspapers: Why Murdoch is right and why he will fail

Murdoch is right. By taking stories of Google, his customers will have to come to his site to read the news there. It has worked for Schibsted in Norway, but then again, they have a virtual monopoly on country wide news (at least a very high share). If more newspapers follow Murdoch, it will work for them to, but it is unlikely that it will work if only News Corp. Newspapers follow this practice. This may be viewed as a prisoner’s dilemma game. If no newspapers choose to have their news on Google, then the entire newspaper sector will benefit, because consumers will be forced to go directly to the sites they wish to read news from, and thus watch the ads, or pay for the content. However, in such a scenario each individual newspaper will benefit relative to the others should they choose to index their sites, because they might up their share of readers. Therefore it is likely that Murdoch will be alone outside of Google Search and Google News, and loose readers due to it.

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