Amazing what you can see if your camera runs at 2,000 fps.
Thanks to Brian for the link.
Category Archives: Media ecology
Fantasy land: or the myth of the Digger’s omniscience
Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post about the
“swine flu of stupidity spreading about the Murdoch meme of blocking Google from indexing a site’s content (to which Google always replies that you’ve always been able to do that with robots.txt – so go ahead if you want). I love that The Reach Group (TRG), a German consulting company, has quantified just how damaging that would be to Google: hardly at all.”
The analysis is interesting — see Jeff’s post for the details. He’s also done a useful job of summarising some of the dafter ideas sparked by commentators’ awe of Rupert Murdoch. Sample:
Jason Calicanis fantasizes about Microsoft paying The New York Times to leave Google’s index for Bing. Let me explain why that would never happen. 1. The Times is not stupid. 2. Times subsidiary About.com – the only bright spot these days in the NYTimesCo’s P&L – gets 80% of its traffic and 50% of its revenue from Google. 3. See rule No. 1.
Michael Arrington then joined in the fantasy saying that News Corp. could change the balance by shifting to Bing, but ends his post with his own reality check: MySpace – increasingly a disaster in News Corp’s P&L – is attempting to negotiate its $300 million deal with Google.
Microsoft can suck up to European publishers all it wants – even adopting their ACAP “standard,” which no one in the search industry is saluting because, as Google often points out, it addresses the desires only of a small proportion of sites and it would end up aiding spammers – but it won’t make a damned bit of difference.
As Erick Schonfeld reports, also on TechCrunch, if WSJ.com turned off Google it would lose 25% of its web traffic. He quotes Hitwise, which says 15% comes from Google search, 12% from Google News – and 7% from Drudge (aggregator), and 2% from Real Clear Politics (aggregator).
It’s like I said:
The prevailing sentiment however can be summed up as a paradox: nobody thinks that a “screw-you-Google” strategy makes sense, but they assume that Murdoch knows something they don’t, and that the strategy will make sense when all is revealed. In that way, the Digger is rather like Warren Buffett: his past investment record is so good that people are wary of questioning his judgment.
That was the Media Week That Was
Talk about a sign of the times! Haymarket has just announced that the current issue of Media Week will be the last to appear in print. Excerpt:
Following the restructure, MediaWeek will no longer be published in print but will continue online under the control of a full-time editor and drawing on the resources of an enlarged Brand Republic news team. MediaWeek.co.uk has monthly traffic in excess of 80,000 unique users along with two daily email bulletins that are read by more than 25,000 commercial media professionals.
The successful MediaWeek Awards, annual Media 360 conference and other marketing communications events run under the MediaWeek brand continue unaffected.
Revolution will now be distributed as a quarterly supplement with Marketing magazine, and will be backed by a new blogging initiative in 2010…
Turning Fleet Street into Quality Street
This morning’s Observer column.
If you want to return to the past, it makes sense to understand it, and here we run into some puzzles. Take the notion that, in the good ol’ days of print, customers paid for content.
Shortly before writing that sentence I was handed a copy of the London Evening Standard, which contained lots of ‘content’ but was, er, free. And although this is the most conspicuous example in the UK of printed content being given away, free newspapers have been thriving for decades. The only thing that marks out the Standard from a provincial freesheet is that its content is of a higher class. So even in the newspaper world, lots of content has been free for ages…
Microsoft to fund ACAP development?
The search by newspaper publishers for DRM-for-papers continues. ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) is currently their Great White Hope. This report from TechCrunch suggests that Microsoft might be getting in on the act.
Our sources say Microsoft has pledged to help fund research and engineering into ACAP to the tune of about will put £100,000. This is the more granular version of the robots.txt protocol which has been proposed by publishers to enable them to have a more sophisticated response to search engine crawlers. However, we understand that Microsoft won’t be involved in developing the protocol, just the financial funding.
For years, Google has characterised the debate about search engines as “you are either in our index or not in it, there is no half-way house.” But the Automated Content Access Protocol ”ACAP” proposes a far more layered response, allowing full access or just access to some content of a site. Unsurprisingly, it’s been developed by a consortium of the World Association of Newspapers, European Publishers Council and International Publishers Association. Proposed in 2006, it has been criticised as being biased towards publishers rather than search engines, specifically Google, and few non-ACAP members have adopted the protocol. Some call it the “DRM of newspaper web sites”. That said some 1,600 traditional publishers have signed up to using ACAP.
But if Bing starts to play ball with ACAP, this could change the game. Suddenly newspapers will have a stick, and a heavyweight enforcer in the shape of Bing, with which to beat Google. Google would have a choice – either recognise the ACAP protocol in order to get some level of access to newspaper sites, or just ignore it…
The Digger’s logic: cut off your nose to spite your face
In that already-notorious interview, Murdoch says he’s considering blocking Google from accessing NewsCorp sites. In that context, this Hitwise chart is interesting. It shows the percentage of WSJ traffic that is driven by Google searches.
“In fact”, says Bill Tancer of Hitwise,
“on a weekly basis Google and Google news are the top traffic providers for WSJ.com account for over 25% of WSJ.com’s traffic. Even more telling. According to Experian Hitwise data, over 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are “new” users who haven’t visited the domain in the last 30 days.”
All of which makes one wonder what the Digger’s been smoking.
An open letter to the Digger
Nice Crikey post.
Now this morning, Mr Murdoch, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t misrepresenting your comments. Rather than watch your full 37-minute interview with Sky News Australia — deadlines, deadlines! — I wanted a news report.
I went to Google News and typed “murdoch block google”. The first result was this story at the UK’s Telegraph.
I went to Microsoft’s Bing and typed the same thing. Their top link was this story at the Guardian.
(I also searched the news at Yahoo!7 and their one and only result was a Crikey story from a month ago. Fail.)
I clicked through and read their stories — you don’t see full stories in search engines, Mr Murdoch, you have to click through. I saw their adverts. They got traffic.
Do you own the Telegraph or the Guardian, Mr Murdoch?
Oh dear.
C’mon Digger: bring on yer paywall! We need this experiment.
En passant:I see from his newsletter that Jason Calcanis is pushing the idea that Microsoft should pay publishers to let Bing index their content as a way of screwing Google. Stand by for an outbreak of my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend syndrome. I suspect that we’re approaching the point where Murdoch & Co will discover the full power of network effects.
LATER: Cory Doctorow has a lovely column in the Guardian about Murdoch’s increasingly erratic pronouncements. Excerpt:
Rupert has got dealmaker’s flu, a bug he acquired when he bought MySpace and sold the exclusive right to index it to Google. This had the temporary effect of making Rupert look like a technology genius, as Google’s putative payout for this right made the MySpace deal instantly profitable, at least on paper; meanwhile, MySpace’s star was in decline, thanks to competition from Facebook, Twitter and a million me-too social networking tools.
It also put ideas into Rupert’s head.
You can practically see the maths on the blackboard behind his eyelids: Exclusive deals + paywalls = money.
I think that Rupert is betting that one of Google’s badly trailing competitors can be coaxed into paying for the right to index all of Newscorp’s online stuff, if that right is exclusive. Rupert is thinking that a company such as Microsoft will be willing to pay to shore up its also-ran search tool, Bing, by buying the right to index the fraction of a fraction of a sliver of a crumb of the internet that Newscorp owns.
They’ll be able to advertise: “We have Rupert’s pages and Google doesn’t, so search with us!” (Actually, they’ll have to advertise: “We have Rupert’s pages and Google doesn’t, except MySpace, which Google has.”)
Or maybe not – MySpace isn’t delivering the traffic Rupert guaranteed Google in his little deal, and Google may bail if there’s a likely sucker on the line.
Maybe the target isn’t Microsoft. Maybe it’s some gullible startup that’s even now walking up and down Sand Hill Road, the heart of Venture Capital Country in Silicon Valley, showing off a PowerPoint deck whose entire message can be summarised as: “You give us a heptillion dollars, we’ll do exclusive search deals with Rupert and the other media behemoths, and we’ll freeze Google out.”
Murdoch is a bit like a malign version of Warren Buffett, in the sense that people are so impressed/intimidated by his past record that they’re reluctant to criticise him now. Like Buffett, the Digger has made great bets in his time (e.g. buying the Sun< and turning it round, launching Sky, etc.) and some of them required stamina and courage to seem them through. So at the moment even though most people don’t believe that his paywall strategy can work in a networked ecosystem, they have a kind of superstitious reluctance to express their scepticism out loud.
Digger delays his charge
Well, well. It seems that the Digger has run into some difficulties.
Rupert Murdoch admitted last night that his plans for News Corp newspapers to begin charging online by June next year, might have to be postponed.
To date the media mogul has been the most proactive publisher in the move to charge for online news, consistently repeating the mantra that: “Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting.”
Tsk, tsk. Poor project management.
The fearful commentariat
Nice piece by Shane Richmond in the Telegraph about how fear and loathing of Twitter is leading newspaper columnists to make utter fools of themselves.
It’s now possible for columnists and companies to hear what people are saying about them. That’s unnerving for columnists, not least because their opinions are now frequently challenged by people who know more than they do. Instead of responding like adults – correcting when they’ve made a mistake, engaging when someone raises a sensible point and defending themselves from false accusations – they are whining like children and dismissing technologies that they don’t understand.
It’s not the complaints culture on Twitter that annoys me, it’s the complaints culture among columnists that is getting tiresome.
Amen. Worth reading in full.