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Posts Tagged ‘news corp’

Old habits die hard. Rupert Murdoch believes that the future of the newspaper business is subscriptions—electronic subscriptions. He’s done with giving away his news for free on the Web and to search engines like Google. Instead thinks that Kindle-like tablet computers can save the media industry. It’s a notion that’s been floated before: an entire newsstand in a color tablet which delivers electronic versions of any newspaper or magazine you want for a monthly subscription of $15 to $19 a month.

It’s got to work, otherwise, he warns from his soapbox, “Newspapers will go out of business. All newspapers.” In an interview on his own Fox Business (embedded below), he explains his thinking:

ALEXIS GLICK: ARE YOU CONVINCED IT IS GOING TO WORK?

RUPERT MURDOCH: WE TEST MARKETED IT AND PEOPLE I THINK UNDERSTAND THAT IT’S PERFECTLY FAIR THAT THEY ARE GOING TO PAY FOR IT. IF IT DOESN’T, THE NEWSPAPERS WILL GO OUT OF BUSINESS. ALL NEWSPAPERS. THERE IS JUST NOT ENOUGH ADVERTISING TO GO AROUND FOR ALL THE SITES ON THE INTERNET. THE NUMBER OF SITES AND AVAILABILITY OF ADVERTISING ON THE INTERNET, THE AVAILABILITY DOUBLES AND TRIPLES EVERY YEAR BUT THE AMOUNT OF REAL MONEY GOES UP 10 OR 15% A YEAR. THE PRICE OF IT KEEPS COMING DOWN.

Forget for a moment that news websites will be perfectly readable on these newfangled tablets everyone keeps talking about. So Murdoch still has the problem of “>”leading” all of his media competitors into the promised land of subscription tablets by walling off their websites from readers. And also set aside the fact that newspapers and magazines are already available for paid download on Amazon’s Kindle, and that those subscription revenues are still miniscule. A full-color tablet with access to an entire newsstand’s worth of magazines and newspapers for a single bundled price would be a better deal and better experience than buying subscriptions a la carté from the Kindle.

But in the face of free content readable via a browser, the subscription model will be challenged. Even setting aside competition from newer media sites and blogs with lower cost structures and lean staffs, there is no way to completely wall off news from every traditional news organization. At the very least, the weakest newspapers and magazines with the lowest readership and share of attention will find that they are better off remaining free and selling Web ads than taking crumbs from the new electronic subscrtiption pie. (Presumably the subscription revenue will be divvied up based on demand, with the most popular titles getting the largest portion).

Apparently, Murdoch also has no interest in simply playing Bing off of Google and making the search engines pay for the right to index his news either. Asked whether he was “moving towards an exclusive deal” with the “aggregators and the Googles of the world” to make them “pay for News Corp. content,” Murdoch replied:

NO, NO, NO. I DON’T KNOW THAT THEY CAN AFFORD TO DO THAT. IF THEY WERE TO PAY EVERYBODY FOR EVERYTHING THEY TOOK FROM EVERY NEWSPAPER IN THE WORLD, AND EVERY MAGAZINE, THEY WOULDN’T HAVE ANY PROFITS LEFT.

You got that? Even if he were to sell his news to Google, which he is not, Google doesn’t have enough money to buy it. Either that, or Murdoch is negotiating in public as Google’s search deal with MySpace comes up for renewal.

Video and partial transcript below:

Watch the latest business video at FOXBusiness.com

Transcript excerpt via Fox Business News

ALEXIS GLICK: YOU HAVE MADE A LOT OF NEWS ABOUT AGGREGATORS AND GOOGLES OF THE WORLD AND WHETHER THEY SHOULD PAY FOR NEWS CORP. CONTENT. ARE YOU MOVING TOWARD EXCLUSIVE DEAL WITH THEM?

RUPERT MURDOCH: NO, NO, NO. I DON’T KNOW THAT THEY CAN AFFORD TO DO THAT. IF THEY WERE TO PAY EVERYBODY FOR EVERYTHING THEY TOOK FROM EVERY NEWSPAPER IN THE WORLD, AND EVERY MAGAZINE, THEY WOULDN’T HAVE ANY PROFITS LEFT. THEY HAVE DEVISED A BRILLIANT SEARCH ENGINE THAT SCRAPES ALL OF THE MATERIAL PUBLISHED IN THE WORLD, AND ON THE BACK OF THAT THEY SELL SEARCH, BUT THEY DON’T PAY FOR THE RAW MATERIAL. WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT. WE CAN PUBLISH OUR PAPERS ELECTRONICALLY, AND OTHERS CAN TOO, AND PEOPLE CAN STILL GO TO A SEARCH ENGINE IF THEY WANT TO FIND OUT SOMETHING, NOT NEWS PERHAPS, BUT THEY SEE TERMS THAT NEWS REFERS TO IN NEWSPAPER STORIES AND MAGAZINES THEY CAN EITHER GO TO GOOGLE OR MICROSOFT OR WHOEVER. THEY’LL STILL HAVE A VERY GOOD BUSINESS.

ALEXIS GLICK: YOU ENVISION A WORLD THEN WITH A TABLET, A HANDHELD DEVICE OR SOMETHING OF THAT NATURE WHERE YOU CAN OFFER A FINANCIAL MARKETPLACE OR A SUPERMARKET FULL OF MEDIA CONTENT AND DATA ON A MULTI-TIERED SYSTEM?

RUPERT MURDOCH: YES.

ALEXIS GLICK: HOW DOES THAT WORK?

RUPERT MURDOCH: WELL, YOU’D BE ABLE TO GET ON IT, AS WOULD BE TRANSMITTED TO IT, A TABLET. TRANSMITTED THROUGH THE AIR OR OVER WI-FI. A REASONABLE SIZE, ATTRACTIVE TABLET IN FULL COLOR AND YOU COULD READ A NEWSPAPER ON IT. YOU PRESS A BUTTON WHEN YOU WANT IT OR IF YOU WANT TO PLAY EXTRA, MORE THAN THAT, BUT IF IT COSTS $15 OR $19 A MONTH, IF YOU WANTED TRAVEL MAGAZINES OR SOMETHING YOU CAN ORDER THEM UP AND HAVE THEM.

ALEXIS GLICK: ON THE TABLET, IF I PAY THE MAXIMUM AMOUNT I CAN HAVE ANYTHING I WANT?

RUPERT MURDOCH: ANY CONTENT. BOOKS, ANYTHING AT ALL. YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY. THAT’S THE FUTURE. IT COSTS A FORTUNE. THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY – THE NEWS INDUSTRY, PUT IT THAT WAY. LET’S NOT TALK ABOUT PAPER. THE NEWS INDUSTRY SPENDS A FORTUNE IN COLLECTING THE NEWS. IT NEEDS TO BE PAID FOR IT. THERE IS NOT ENOUGH ADVERTISING TO GO AROUND. IT’S ALRIGHT ON CABLE TELEVISION BECAUSE IT GETS PAID BY THE CABLE SUPPLIERS, MONEY, WHICH, OF COURSE, GETS PASSED ON TO THE PUBLIC. AS WELL AS SUPPLEMENTED BY SOME ADVERTISING AND IT HAS TO BE THE SAME WITH OTHER FORMS OF NEWS.

ALEXIS GLICK: ARE YOU CONVINCED IT IS GOING TO WORK?

RUPERT MURDOCH: SURE.

ALEXIS GLICK: WHY?

RUPERT MURDOCH: WE TEST MARKETED IT AND PEOPLE I THINK UNDERSTAND THAT IT’S PERFECTLY FAIR THAT THEY ARE GOING TO PAY FOR IT. IF IT DOESN’T, THE NEWSPAPERS WILL GO OUT OF BUSINESS. ALL NEWSPAPERS. THERE IS JUST NOT ENOUGH ADVERTISING TO GO AROUND FOR ALL THE SITES ON THE INTERNET. THE NUMBER OF SITES AND AVAILABILITY OF ADVERTISING ON THE INTERNET, THE AVAILABILITY DOUBLES AND TRIPLES EVERY YEAR BUT THE AMOUNT OF REAL MONEY GOES UP 10 OR 15% A YEAR. THE PRICE OF IT KEEPS COMING DOWN.

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Joyent, the Californian provider of cloud computing solutions – although they like to refer to that as delivering “web application hosting Infrastructure as a Service” – today announced that it raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Intel Capital.

The news comes only a few weeks after Intel helped the 5-year old company launch a cloud computing service in mainland China, reportedly the first ever to launch over there.

Joyent says it will use the extra cash to accelerate its product development and expand its sales & marketing efforts around the world.

The investment by Intel Capital in Joyent was announced today at the investment organization’s 10th Annual CEO Summit, where seven investments were made public (for approximately $25 million in total). The other six capital infusions went to Korea-based Crucialtec, Taiwan-based Gudeng Precision Industrial Co, Japan-based V-cube, China-based Phoenix New Media, United Arab Emirates-based NeuString and US-based Active Storage.

In a blog post about the reasons for accepting institutional financing for the first time since its inception in 2004, Joyent founder and CEO David Young disclosed that the company earlier raised a small seed funding round from Peter Thiel and the good old “myself, friends and family” and turned profitable quickly. So why raise extra funding?

Young explains:

Joyent has been able to grow to thousands of customers globally by force of hard work, a lot of luck, and an extraordinary time when the costs of developing and delivering software products have dropped practically to zero. While Joyent has been profitable for much of the company’s existence, we raised money because Joyent has a revenue model, and a product model and roadmap, that we believe can benefit from immensely increased scale.

Joyent counts some noteworthy companies among its customers, including social network LinkedIn, social gaming platform operator Watercooler and clothing and home good retailer Gilt Groupe. They used to handle hosting for Twitter, too, but that relationship turned sour in early 2008 after frequent downtime issues.

Curious to see what the future holds for the company.

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I’ve mostly been a spectator in this whole Rupert Murdoch de-indexing his news sites from Google circus. First because I didn’t really believe he even knew what he was talking about (or how much traffic he’d lose), and more recently because Erick Schonfeld took the story here at TechCrunch.

But suddenly this is a fascinating story to me for a bunch of reasons. This may be less about the self destruction of traditional journalism and more about the search wars.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who used to work for Murdoch’s Digital Chief Jonathan Miller when the two were at AOL, posted a video last week (embedded below) with a simple suggestion: Not only should Murdoch de-index from Google, but he should get Bing to pay him for the exclusive right to index it. TechCrunch Europe’s Mike Butcher has been sniffing down a similar trail.

If other media companies joined Murdoch Google could actually find itself in a very difficult position, where Bing had content that Google didn’t. If you knew that Wall Street Journal and, say, New York TImes content was only in Bing search results, mainstream search users would suddenly have a big reason to go to Bing.

This would shift the balance of power away from search engines and to the content sites – if they could pull it off. Bidding wars over rights to index content would conceivably break out between Google and Microsoft, just as bidding wars have broken out in the past over the right to serve search ads into third party publishing sites.

If Murdoch is going to go through with this de-indexing Mexican standoff thing, he might as well do it the right way and drive the fear of God into Google. As a spectator, I’ll enjoy watching the fireworks.

Of course there’s another sideshow going on here as well – the renegotiation of the MySpace search deal with Google that ends next year. That deal brings in $300 million a year to News Corp., and it’s clear Google is done paying that much money.

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Perhaps the top reason to use Bit.ly (beyond obviously shortening links) is for its analytics. The service makes it easy to see all sorts of data about your short URL links going out to services like Twitter. But sometimes looking at the bigger picture is more interesting than individual data. Now you can see that too.

Today, the service has unveiled its new Bit.ly Click Summary. This is a new page on the site that allows you to see aggregate data for all your Bit.ly links over a set period of time. Currently, this only works for the past 7 days, but Bit.ly says that monthly views will be added soon as well.

Along the top of this new page, you’ll see a bar graph showing your aggregate clicks over each of the last seven days. Next to that, you’ll find pie charts showing Top Referrers and Locations for your link data. Finally, below that is a huge list of referrer and country data for the set time period (again, in this case, a week).

The referrer list is particularly interesting because it gives you a good sense of which Twitter clients are most popular among the people that click on your links.

As Twitter’s default URL shortener, Bit.ly has been gathering a ton of valuable link data for quite some time now. We’re still waiting for them to launch Bit.ly Now, a service expected to take on popular link sites like Digg.

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We recently reviewed Wasabi, Netvibes’ powerful new stream reader which consolidates news feeds, blogs, Twitter and Facebook streams, email, and more in an extremely manageable interface. The site entered private beta recently and we have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers. To get an invite, visit Wasabi and enter the code “WASABITC.”

As we wrote earlier, Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini demonstrated parts of Wasabi at our first Realtime CrunchUp in July. In addition to the traditional widget view, which breaks up your feeds and applications into a grid of boxes on your Netvibes homepage, Wasabi now also has a “smart reader” view. The smart reader borrows from traditional RSS readers in that all the feeds and widgets you subscribe to are presented together in one column, updated in reverse chronological order.

You can see just a list of headlines, or an expanded view with the full feed. It looks similar to Google Reader, except that Netvibes supports more than just RSS feeds. You can import your Twitter and Facebook streams (read-only right now), as well as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Flickr photos, weather widgets, stock widgets, and more. Plus, Wasabi has also sped things up to make the stream as realtime as possible. It is caching content from the most popular feeds and pushing that down to users as soon as there are any updates, and it will also be supporting both the Pubsubhubbub (PuSH) and RSSCloud standards aimed at eliminating the lag time inherent in RSS and Atom feeds.

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Moments after Craigslist founder Craig Newmark joins the Wikimedia/Wikipedia advisory board things start to go crazy.

Way back in 2006 Jason Calacanis, then an executive at AOL, was trying to convince Wikipedia to puts ads on the site. It would generate $100 million a year in revenue, he said, which could fund the project and other charities:

I sat next to Jimbo at a Wikipedia dinner over the summer. I begged him to put a leaderboard on Wikipedia and told him I would get AOL to sell it and host Wikipedia–for free. He declined saying there will never be ads on Wikipedia. I then explained to him in detail how that one leaderboard could make over $100M per year. I told him that they should take the $100M and give it to charity. They could help fund MediaWiki, the EFF, Firefox, and dozens of other open source projects.

Agree with them or not, Wikipedia has held firm to their no-ads philosophy, struggling through with donations instead. But today Rex Hammock noticed something on Wikipedia – a banner ad.

These aren’t “real” ads promoting third party sites, products, etc. They’re just in house ads reiterating the policy that Wikipedia will never have ads. But they clearly are ads. As a commenter notes below, Adblocker even filters them out.

“Knowledge Forever, Ad-Free Forever, Wikipedia Forever,” say the ads. They link to this page asking for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Update: Readers point out that this is an annual effort by Wikipedia.

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As Microsoft shed its beta tag for the launch of the UK version of Bing today, TechCrunch Europe has learnt that it held a secret meeting with a group of big European publishers, mainly newspapers.

The meeting came literally days after Rupoert Murdoch said he was considering withdrawing his vast newspaper empire from Google’s index, despite the possibility of losing a lot of traffic.

What was discussed provides a glimpse of what newspaper publishers may do next, and how Bing will collude in this new war on Google.

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Once again, News Corp. is threatening to hide itself from the rest of the Web. Earlier this week, Rupert Murdoch told an Australian interviewer that he might start blocking Google from the WSJ.com and his other news sites, even though Google accounts for about 25 percent of the traffic to the WSJ.com. Now his digital lieutenant Jon Miller is echoing his boss and warning that a move to block Google may come within the next few months. But he qualifies that by saying that News Corp must “lead” other media companies against Google for this to work. In other words, News Corp can’t go it alone.

I’m not sure what other media companies, other than the AP, might be willing to follow. While the WSJ actually does quite a good job getting people to pay subscriptions online, and supplements that with advertising revenue to those paid subscribers, it is not clear how many other media brands can command that kind of loyalty. If Murdoch can get any of his newspaper rivals to once again retreat behind pay walls, it most surely will hurt them more than it will hurt Google.

In fact, Murdoch is such a sly fox, it is hard to say who he is really going after here. By playing on his rival’s fears of Google becoming the new homepage for news, he might convince some of them to deny Google the ability to index their sites. He knows that the WSJ.com at least can survive on its own, and if the ploy doesn’t work out, he can always reverse himself. But you can’t help but suspect that all of this public strategizing is nothing more than a trial balloon to see if any other news companies are willing to come along on a Google boycott.

Any such boycott, which would entail nothing more than requesting that Google stop indexing their news sites and thus become invisible to most people on the Web, will only hasten the demise of most of Murdoch’s rivals. Unless, of course, part of the plan is to turn to Bing instead and sell exclusive indexing rights for gobs of cash. It’s a risky move, however, because the WSJ and Murdoch’s other news sites could get caught in the crossfire as well.

The notion of News Corp leading other media companies in this battle reminds me of the last scene of Gallipoli, the WWI movie set in Australia, when the infantry goes over trench wall, only to get slaughtered by the enemy.

Col. Robinson: Tell Major Barton that the attack must proceed.
Frank Dunne: Sir, I don’t think you’ve got the picture. They are being cut down before they can get five yards.
[hits the phone]
Col. Robinson: Bloody line! Our marker flags were seen in the Turkish trenches. The attack must continue at all costs.
Frank Dunne: But…
Col. Robinson: I repeat, the attack must proceed!

Or perhaps Blackadder is more appropriate here:

Melchett: Field Marshal Haig has formulated a brilliant new tactical plan to ensure final victory in the field.
Blackadder: Ah. Would this brilliant plan involve us climbing out of our trenches and walking very slowly towards the enemy?
Captain Darling: How could you possibly know that, Blackadder? It’s classified information!
Blackadder: It’s the same plan that we used last time and the seventeen times before that.
Melchett: Exactly! And that is what is so brilliant about it! It will catch the watchful Hun totally off guard! Doing precisely what we’ve done eighteen times before is exactly the last thing they’ll expect us to do this time! There is, however, one small problem.
Blackadder: That everyone always gets slaughtered in the first ten seconds.

Charge! Hey, where is everybody?

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Craigslist founder Craig Newmark will join the advisory board of Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation advisory board was created in January 2007. The main job of advisory board members is to attend a once a year meeting at the annual Wikimania conference. They also contribute in their specific areas of expertise. I guess that means customer service for Newmark (his Craigslist title is Customer Service Rep), as well as patting Wikipedia on the back for also creating a massively massive website based at least party on sparsity of design (something he has direct experience doing himself).

Newmark has called Wikipedia “first draft of history.” Current advisory board members include:

Angela Beesley Starling (Chair, Wikimedia Advisory Board; co-founder, Wikia)
Ward Cunningham (Developer of the first wiki)
Melissa Hagemann (Open access and open education advocate, Open Society Institute/Soros foundations)
Mitch Kapor (Founder/Co-founder Lotus Development, EFF, Mozilla Foundation)
Neeru Khosla (Co-founder, CK-12)
Teemu Leinonen (Professor, Media Lab, Aalto University)
Rebecca MacKinnon (Journalist; founder, Global Voices Online)
Wayne Mackintosh (Education specialist, Commonwealth of Learning)
Benjamin Mako Hill (Author, free software advocate)
Roger McNamee (Venture capital, musician)
Trevor Neilson (Partner, Global Philanthropy Group)
Craig Newmark (Founder, Craigslist.org)
Florence Nibart-Devouard (Former Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees; Consultant in Collaborative Media)
Achal Prabhala (Researcher and writer)
Clay Shirky (Associate Teacher, Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU)
Ethan Zuckerman (Research Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School)

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FOX News and MySpace are partnering to launch Fox’s citizen journalism social media platform on MySpace, called uReport. MySpace members can share citizen produced content with the MySpace community, as well as have the chance to be featured on FOX News. FOX News and MySpace are both owned by News Corp.

FOX News uReport, which is nearly identical to CNN’s citizen journalism initiative iReport, is a platform through which users can upload photos and videos to FOX News from a computer or mobile device. Members of the MySpace-uReport community can become “uReporters” by uploading video and photos tagged by specific news categories, including entertainment and politics. FOX says that this content could be featured in programming on FOX News Channel and foxnews.com, with FOX News maintaining editorial control of the MySpace page.

CNN’s iReport has a Facebook page where iReporters can upload footage, photos and content to the platform but it’s unclear if this footage is used on CNN.com or on the CNN news channel. CNN’s iReport famously caused Apple’s stock to drop after someone posted a false rumor about Steve Jobs having a heart attack. Fox may have missed its chance, since the most activity on CNN’s iReport was leading up to the presidential election and inauguration. CNN partnered with Facebook to cover the inauguration events in January.

uReport on MySpace

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