The partnership between Microsoft and News Corp seems odd

Sometimes, I feel like I’m missing something. As a blog owner, I like writing, and I like having people read what I write. You might notice that many blogs also advertise. Even though the typical blogger doesn’t make much money from their posts, some bloggers do quite well financially. Since advertising a blog can be costly, the dream is to get good placement in the results of the major search engines. Normally, high traffic can mean high revenue, while reduced traffic can mean less revenue. That’s why News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch has me puzzled.

There’s no doubt that Rupert Murdoch is a bright, successful guy. That’s why his latest idea seems to be risky: Removing all of his newspapers from Google’s index. News Corp owns well-known newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and The Sun. Murdoch seems to feel that Google is unfairly benefiting from News Corp’s content. In the past, Murdoch had mentioned ending their use of a free model and going to a subscription format. Now, another plan may have surfaced.

It appears that Microsoft has approached content providers and offered to pay them to index their sites and content with Bing.com and de-index their sites from Google. It’s certainly a bold initiative, but I question its effectiveness, and worry about the precedent it might set.

Companies like News Corp will likely receive a large payment from Bing, but will this be enough to off-set lost traffic? Let’s not forget that Google handles more than half of all searches on the internet, while Bing has less than 10%. Since newspapers derive most of their revenue from advertising, won’t fewer clicks mean less revenue? Although, while it could be bad for News Corp’s papers, it could be great for their competition. By removing News Corp and other content providers approached by Microsoft, the remaining providers will likely get more traffic.

Finally, we have to worry about corrupted search results. Do you really want to use a search engine that pays for content? If this model is successful, how will it be applied to other web sites? Will companies who refuse to pay be buried in search results or omitted entirely? I don’t see how this will improve Bing’s product, ie. its search results.

I typically use Google or Yahoo for searches, and have only used Bing a few times. If Microsoft does follow this model, they might see a decrease in the number of users who visit and trust their site, and the same could be true of their business partners.