Rupert Murdoch to Internet: “Get Off My Lawn”

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To get everyone up to speed, Rupert Murdoch is the News Corporation CEO and owner of such fine news media outlets as Fox News, the Sun, and the Times. (By the way, the Internet needs a universally agreed upon “sarcasm” formatting.)

In recent weeks, Murdoch has begun to lay out plans to remove much of his News Corp content from the eyes of popular search engines. Claiming that sites like Google “steal” his material, Murdoch plans to implement a giant “paywall” around his news empire, forcing users to pay a subscription fee in order to view his content.

After announcing this, every tech blog and social media site went berserk with laughter, with Twitter founder Biz Stone predicting Murdoch’s plan to “fail fast”.

I, for one, cannot wait to see this grumpy old man fight the Internet. To me, Rupert Murdoch is the 12:00-flashing VCR of the 21^st century.

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I’m sure there are millions of seniors in this country who are frequently frustrated by this new-fangled Internet thing. But none of them before have had 4 billion dollars. Finally, at long last, we will see some grade-A, front porch, million-dollar cane shaking!

This is gonna be fun.

It’s a major misconception for news networks in this day and age to think that the news is their own “content”. The actual news, or the events of the world, is merely data, and the job of the news outlet is to build an analysis of this data. With an open communication network such as the Internet, the number of individuals performing analysis is growing at rates never seen before. The blogosphere and Twitter have you pretty much covered. And unless your particular analysis has some special sauce worth the extra nickel, a freebie analysis is always going to win.

Here’s what will happen to News Corp.

Some people will subscribe to Murdoch’s stuff, most will not. The people subscribing will be retired conservative die-hard Fox Newsers. The rest of the world will simply read the same headline for free elsewhere. Murdoch will not attract new readers, site visibility will decrease, advertisers will pay less, viewers will (probably literally) die out, and less money will come in.

But as he himself admits , “we’d rather have fewer people coming to our websites, but paying.” At least he won’t be surprised when this happens.

So good luck, Rupert. Thankfully, people seem to be already looking to voluntarily remove your crap from their news aggregates.

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