Much will be said and written about the reported news that Mr. Murdoch is close to signing a deal with Microsoft (source NPR), disallowing Google from searching and indexing his company’s content and getting paid by Microsoft for the search access. We will hear more about how content is free or wants to be free, how it is commoditized and how people can get free content from somewhere else. The most vocal proponent of them all, Mr. Jeff Jarvis, described WSJ’s move as, “it is suicidal”. At the other extreme, Mr. Murdoch described Google as, “stealing my content”.
The truth, however, lies somewhere in between.
On the content wants to be free argument: This is an extreme position treating all contents as the same and treating all customers the same. The value of content is in the minds of the customers and it varies across segments. For instance, my WTP for WSJ opinion pieces is $0. There are news articles that add no unique value and hence by definition are commoditized. While other articles, even thought they have high value, fail to capture value because of alternative free means of accessing these articles (WSJ articles can be accessed for free through Google searches).
On customers don’t want to pay for content: It is a widely accepted notion that customers do not want to pay for access to content. There is no basis to these and any marketing research studies done are not rigorous enough. This is the very definition of Conventional Wisdom, and going against it will be seen as disastrous move.
On “it is suicidal”: It definitely is not. WSJ still makes a great portion of its revenue from paid subscriptions. It takes a lot more Ads and CPM to get the same amount of revenue. For someone running one of the top sources of business information we should give WSJ the benefit of doubt that they did the revenue models and calculated loss of revenue from Google traffic. If they were not monetizing much of current traffic, it is not a devastating loss and it offers future revenue potential from subscriptions.
On the stealing argument: This is another extreme claim. What is true is Google can and does monetize search results with search Ads and it does not share those revenues with WSJ or with any other source. One thing Google or other search engines do is lowering customer’s reference price for the articles, preventing WSJ and others from capturing value. It is not that far off for Murdoch to get recover some of that by asking Google and Microsoft to pay for indexing access.
On charging for content: Charging for content starts with value, communicating that value, and protecting that value through reference prices. How can you credibly communicate value of a newspaper or a Journal? WSJ is taking the approach of showing what is possible from reading, sometimes even drawing suspect causations based on correlations. Another example is Elsevier, which is communicating value of its online journals articles through by making (again somewhat suspect) causation arguments showing new research grant. Both WSJ and Elsevier may be using causation argument when none exist but they are trying and spending resources on creating the value proposition while most others do not even know how to communicate theirs.
This is not a battle between Murdoch and Google or other search engines, this is the beginning of the efforts by content producers, those who create value, to capture their fair share.
Iterative Path 