As a multi part blog post, I outline my belief 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 objections to this rumored deal, and then discuss both the likely short term and long term response by Google.
In the short term…
If Google responds as I expect them to, they will just start doing deals with other exclusive news providers. They have lot’s of cash, more traffic to offer publishers and a full ad hosting and analytics package that rivals anything that Microsoft can offer. Microsoft can go head to head with Google on bribing…I mean licensing content from…news organizations, but do they really want to? Microsoft is already subsidizing their mobile strategy, their search strategy, the web strategy as both a portal and as a cloud computing platform…how many more business units do they want to have to “invest” in, instead of generating a profit (like they fortunately do with Windows, Office and Server software).
Consumers in the short term…
I would be remiss to not discuss how consumers might respond. I expect that they will either not care and just keep searching as usual (not missing News Corps content at all), or become so fed up with content requiring multiple search engines that they will no longer use search to discover news…but rather use twitter, an xml reader or something that is better suited for finding news anyway. This consumer reaction might ultimately accomplish what Murdoch wants (to extort money from from search engines since it is easier than getting consumers to pay), but does anyone believe that Google will just sit on the sidelines paying extortion fees or watching the process for news discovery to transition to other technology platforms? If consumers start utilizing new tools to consume the news, is there any chance that Google won’t be actively creating/improving/buying existing aggregation tools, or empowering developers to create them on top of existing Google products? (like Desktop search, android, Chrome, etc…).
Next, check out Google’s potential long term response to an exclusive deal between News Corp and Bing.
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[...] I describe my general expectations, and then break down Google’s likely response in the short term. [...]
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[...] 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 [...]
Pingback by Instead of buying news, Bing will be buying failure! « Meritocracy Consulting Blog — November 23, 2009 @ 11:26 am