Will Search Engines Start Paying For Exclusive Rights To Link to Content?
2009 November 23
According to The Financial Times, Microsoft is in discussions with major online publishers including News Corp, to pay them to “de-index” their news websites from Google, and allow Bing.com to index them on an exclusive basis.
News Corp of course owns some premium content including the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the New York Post and The Sun located in the UK, just to name a few.
This would be a landmark deal since it would be the first time search engines would pay for the right to index content thereby putting an enormous value on content.
According to reports, Microsoft’s may also be willing to share with News Corp any profit from paid search advertising related to content from its sites.
This would be a interesting deal and a possible game changer for newspapers who are struggling to find revenue and for other major content providers.
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That’s a really interesting concept, I’m surprised to see an idea that innovative come out of Microsoft. I would expect that to be a Google-first.
I keep saying (in comments in many past posts’ comments) how people need to start charging engines for access to their content. Everyone always says I’m crazy. Now Microsoft is proposing to pay, with a spin of course.
It just makes no sense to me why all these big content producers give away the keys to the castle to google so that they can make like 5% of what Google makes off the same content. It’s not like nobody knows that google is profiting off their content. What a crazy business deal it is the way things currently are.
BTW, think about how much more valuable direct navigation will be in a world where google’s organic results become less relavant. However will probably affect parking revenue negativly.
jp:
You hit the nail on the head here: “BTW, think about how much more valuable direct navigation will be in a world where google’s organic results become less relavant.”
There’s no doubt things will start to change dramatically, and soon. With Microsoft now absolutely committed to taking search market share from Google, things will hopefully heat up across the board on issues like news content and advertising. Maybe this means we’ll one day have access to something other than Adsense for CPC revenue on content webpages too, but maybe I am dreaming.
Microsoft is buy everything..it might be better in the future
i’ve kept an eye on this story for a while, and while it probably goes without saying i think it obvious that murdoch is talking about something more than just robots.txt and the various meta tags that can block his sites from legitimate search indexes — emphasis on “legitimate” as there are plenty of rogue search bots (hosted by online-homeserver, keymachines.de, the list goes on) claiming to belong to google and the other searchies, gobbling up content from the likes of murdoch’s properties and spitting them out on link farms and other dead ends. plenty of content owners on the web do not like google, with its way of spraying unwanted traffic to random sites that only happen to have a keyword somewhere in the text. sites can be blocked via robots.txt, and for some outfits that can solve the problem of unwanted traffic. murdoch’s position is that blocking in this manner does not go far enough, relying as it does on the good intentions of the search companies and their inability/unwillingness to stop indexing harvested content. nothing stops google from indexing splog sites that could contain all wsj or nypost content; nor is google likely to stop indexing message boards and community sites where users habitually copy and paste complete content from whatever news source they please. i don’t know exactly what murdoch is up to or how he intends to reach his goals (whatever they really are) but to me it is shaping up as an interesting look at the future of some web content and a world where searchies begin to have personalities in the way network and print news used to have a “voice”.
Does Murdoch think that by wiping the internet of their faux news that it doesn’t exist?