Newspapers Face the Prisoner's Dilemma With Google

Hugh Pickens writes "Nicholas Carr has an interesting analysis of Rupert Murdoch's threat to de-list News Corp's stories from Google and Microsoft's eager offer to make Bing Murdoch's exclusive search engine for its content. Carr writes that newspapers are caught in a classic Prisoner's Dilemma with Google because Google's search engine 'prevents them from making decent money online — by massively fragmenting traffic, by undermining brand power, and by turning news stories into fungible commodities.' If any single newspaper opts out of Google, their competitors will pick up the traffic they lose. There is only one way that newspapers can break out of the prison — if a critical mass of newspapers opt out of Google's search engine simultaneously, they would suddenly gain substantial market power. Murdoch may have been signaling to other newspapers that 'we'll opt out if you'll opt out,' positioning himself as the would-be ringleader of a massive jailbreak, without actually risking a jailbreak himself. There are signs that Murdoch's signal is working, with reports that the publishers of the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News are now also considering blocking Google. In the meantime, Steve Ballmer is more than happy to play along with Murdoch because although a deal with News Corps would reduce the basic profitability of Microsoft's search business, it would inflict far more damage on Google than on Microsoft."

Biggest lemming run in history

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

This is going to be as funny as hell.

Re:I Don't See the Comparison, More Like MLB Strik

[jDeepbeep]

Also, I'm no robots.txt expert but I think there is a disallow from certain domains syntax they can use to block Google, Microsoft or white list one of the two.

To block Google from all site pages:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

To block Google indexing a certain page (exchange brackets for > / <):
[meta name="googlebot" content="noindex"]

To be less specific in the user-agent line of robots.txt:
User-agent: *

Re:never happen

[cthulu_mt]

Old saying "all new is local".

That's actually "All politics is local." Tip O'Neill

Re:The ac tual Prisoners Dilemma

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the assumption is that allowing Google to index your news site is like ratting. With two sources of news:

If neither rats (lets Google index their news) then both sites get the brand awareness and ad revenue.
If one site rats, then Google gets some of their ad revenue, but they get all the Google directed traffic, which is a win for the ratter.
If both rat (the current status quo), then Google get some of the ad revenue from both sources of content.

What is best for a single site, in order, is:
1. Google indexes their content and no-one else's.
2. Google indexes no-ones content.
3. Google indexes everyone's content.

The dilemma the news sites face is how to get from 3 to 2, without having competitors in position 1.

Of course, this isn't exactly a prisoner's dilemma. The news sites can communicate and make deals. The prisoners caught in the dilemma can't.

Re:Google already licenses the AP feeds

[whencanistop]

Unless Murdoch comes up with an ingenious way of reducing funding for the BBC. Say for example, striking a deal with the opposition politcal party to cover them in a complementary way in their press, in exchange for reduced funding of the BBC when they get into power [guardian.co.uk].

Maybe we should ask Andy Coulson [wikipedia.org] about that one (ex editor of News Of the World - a Murdoch title - and current 'Strategist' for the Conservatives). If he can buy out the UK's free source, he can buy out any other 'not for profit' options.

Google News

[MikeFM]

Google is big enough to just buy or create their own newspaper. If the newspapers cut themselves off from Google there is no reason for Google not to compete with them. Hire their own journalistic team to create high-quality content that people actually want to see instead of the dribble in most newspapers. They could take advantage of technology to be something between a newspaper (text) and tv news (multimedia).

Re:Last gasp of the newspaper

[abigor]

http://www.economist.com/ [economist.com]

Re:What?

[mister_playboy]

Not every website needs to incorporate a bunch of Web 2.0 bullshit. /. could learn a thing or two from Craigslist about simplicity.