Meritocracy Consulting Blog

Much discussion has now broken out about a potential exclusive news deal between News Corp and Microsoft’s Bing.  I actually wrote this article last week, in response to Jason Calacanis’ post where he and others became really excited bout an evil plot to dismantle Google.

I 100% disagree with anyone who thinks that this deal is good for either Bing or News Corp.  Anything along these lines on the part of Microsoft or News Corp would be short sighted and practically suicidal. News sites have taken a beating because they did not embrace technology once, essentially sitting by watching Craigslist, online media and bloggers undermine/make irrelevant their cash cows.  With the profitable aspects of a news organizations already mastered by OTHER companies online (classifieds by Craigslist, advertising by adsense, Business news by a wide range of sites, etc…), the last thing a news company should do is provide a new financial incentive for someone to replace (through incentivized innovation)…the actual news production.  By trying to exclude content from Google, the financial incentives would start to build for Google to compete with them…one way or another.  Currently, the value add for showing news search results is just to keep the visitor loyally using Google…anyone who posts truly objective news, knows how poorly news stories convert with Google adsense.

Suppose this not-so-genius deal gets done, it is prudent to consider both how Google will respond in the short-term and in the  long term.  I also outline how Google would now have a strong incentive to invest in next generation tools that could replace old fashioned news organizations entirely….in a post titled: Do we really want Google motivated to take on news?

There has to be a better alternative for everyone than going down the road of exclusive search engine partnerships.  I plan to post some details on what these alternatives could be…in the meantime, I welcome your feedback and thoughts.