Old fools and the Internet

News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch has proved, yet again, that he is a dinosaur who does not fit in with today’s world in the 21st century. Miffed by aggregators, like Google News, Murdoch has sworn to fight Google and other online aggregators with all his might. Apparently, the old chap does not like the enormous traffic that aggregators like Google drive to his online assets.

Another fool, but not yet as old as Murdoch, is Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons, the magazine’s “pundit” on technology. Lyons shares Murdoch’s views of online aggregators and even calls them “parasites” (as if anyone would ever find or read Lyons’ articles if it were not for Google). Like Murdoch, Lyons calls for an end to aggregators and bloggers linking to specific pages.

Both Murdoch and Lyons do not understand how the Internet works. Today, the main source of online traffic is Google. Unless your site is captured and archived by Google, your site traffic will be extremely low. People who want to find out more about current events usually go to Google News, because it provides one of the easiest and most effective search engines for finding exactly what they are looking for. By comparison, most newspaper and media sites are extremely hard to search, and their internal search engines tend to produce search results that have very little to do with the key words entered.

As a matter of fact, most of those media sites are very user-unfriendly. In Canada, the recent changes to the site of the Globe and Mail have made it almost impossible to search for a specific article from the day’s printed edition. But use Google News, and you will get that article in a flash.

Locating articles and content via an aggregator like Google News does not rob the media companies of anything. Quite the contrary is true. The aggregator only provides the link title and, sometimes, a one- or two-line preview of the original article. Anyone who wishes to read the article has to click through to the original website, where the visitor will also have the chance to view and/or click on online ads, if he or she is so inclined. More importantly, however, the visitor will show up in the stats of the website, thus allowing the media company, like Murdoch’s own online assets, to hike its rates for online ads based on the number of eyeballs.

If Murdoch removes all his news sites from Google News (and probably Google as well), he will experience a drop in visits by at least 85% or more. He plans to compensate for this shortfall by making users pay for accessing his content, but these models never work. People are used to free content, and in return they are willing to put up with pop-up ads and other commercial content.

The New York Times is a prime example : for several years, the venerable newspaper charged for its content, only to abandon the model after it had become a colossal failure. The Times realized that, in view of prolific blogging, it would benefit from all those incoming links. Today, the number of incoming links has grown exponentially, because it is not only bloggers driving traffic anymore, but also millions of Facebook, Twitter and Digg It “recommendations”.

By all means, require your visitors to sign up for a free profile before they can access your content. Armed with all those user profiles, you will be able to canvass and impress online ad companies. But charging for access, either through an annual subscription or on a pay-as-you-read basis, is utter madness.

Murdoch is free to exclude his media sites from the Google News aggregator, but it will not hurt Google one bit. People will use the content that is available, and if News Corp sites are not among it, then people will simply not visit and read them. Online users like to take the path of least resistance. They enter a few key words in a search engine or aggregator and then scan the results. No one, absolutely no one, will ever go to the site of a newspaper and start browsing through it page after page the way we do with printed newspapers.

Search engines and aggregators are the main entry points. This site, too, derives about 95% of its traffic from Google search queries. (It does help to be always among the top five or ten search results.)

Bloggers and aggregators are not thieves for linking to outside content. If merely providing links or references were a crime or copyright violation, every library catalogue of index cards would constitute a major criminal offence. Media companies should actually say thank you to (and, perhaps, even compensate) bloggers and others who drive traffic to their websites, instead of vilifying them as pirates or criminals.

The only link that ought to be severed is that between News Corp and Murdoch. The latter should be retired once and for all now that Rupert has lost touch with reality. And Newsweek should give some serious consideration to hiring a new technology pundit who actually understands what the Internet is all about.