Meritocracy Consulting Blog

As I already posted, I believe that a deal allowing Bing to exclusively license News Corp content (at the expense of Google), would be a great strategy for Bing and News Corp to help each other fail!

I describe my general expectations, and then break down Google’s likely response in the short term.

Now to discuss Google’s likely response in the long term…

The short term shenanigans sound interesting for Murdoch and possibly Bing, but as opposed to the short-term sparring, we should expect a more Googly response in the long-term…the heavy of a replacement to old fashioned news organizations, undermining both the business model and the competitiveness of large branded news organizations…like News Corp.  Google’s mantra is that content, whether free or not, should be available anywhere, in whatever way the consumer wants it…this concept makes sense and will ultimately prevail.  Any company that gets in the way of this strategy has to deal with the general user preference for open distribution…and in this case, the massive engineering strength and cash stockpile of Google…who wants to get their hands on all of the world’s content…period.

So if Google has the silver bullet to undermine old media companies (moreso than they already have), why not do it?

The primary reason is that Google does not stand to gain a whole bunch from becoming a full distributor of complete news.  By full distributor, I mean that Google has full access to the entire news story so that they can do whatever they want with it (mostly customize the display, do mashups, manage voting, allow comments, etc…).  This is especially unappealing since news companies don’t want them to be a full distributor…at least not at the licensing prices Google is currently willing to pay.  Google of course is not willing to pay very much since they don’t want to compete with other content providers (who feed the beastly search index daily) and they also know how poorly news pages convert with ads (Google essentially said the same thing, that news is not a big part of their overall revenue).