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Posts Tagged ‘rupert-murdoch’

Yesterday, Google threw complaining publishers a bone with its First Click Free program, which lets news sites limit the number of free clicks from Google News for any individual to five a day. News sites have long been accusing Google of profiting off of their news with Google News but today Google is making another concession to publishers.

Google is launching a new crawler that will let publishers keep their content out of Google News and still remain in Google Search. Publishers have always been able to do this by filling out a contact form but now Google is making it easier by automating the technology with a news-crawler.

Currently, publishers can block Google from including their content in Google’s main index via a Robots Exclusion Protocol (or REP). When Google’s crawler arrives at any site, it checks to see if there’s a robots.txt file to make sure the search engine has permission to crawl the site. This gives publishers the option to block an entire site or certain sections or pages.

Google is applying this technology specifically to News. News sites can now block images from thew news crawlers but not from general web search. Or on the flipside, a news site could choose to index their content on Google News but not Google’s main search index. If a publisher decides to opt out of Google News but still wants to be indexed on Google Search, content will show up in search results, but won’t appear in the block of news results that sometimes shows up in Web Search.

Publishers stand to gain from indexing on Google news, with News sending publishers about 1 billion clicks every month (and 4 billion clicks per month from all of Google). Josh Cohen, Senior Product Manager For Google News writes:

Each of those clicks is an opportunity for publishers, allowing them to show ads, sell subscriptions and introduce readers to the great content they produce every day. While we think this offers a tremendous opportunity for any publisher who wants new readers, publishers are the ones who create the content and they’re in control of it. If they decide they don’t want to be in Google, it’s easy to do.

The new crawler gives publishers like Rupert Murdoch even more ways to block their news from Google. It’s a Christmas wish come true.

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This afternoon Digg CEO Jay Adelson was interviewed on Fox Business News, where he spoke about the future of Digg and the ways it could potentially cooperate with strugging news organizations. During the interview Adelson made a few interesting comments, some of which contrast with News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch’s assertions in an interview conducted earlier today that “people understand that it’s perfectly fair that they are going to pay for [news]“. Instead, Adelson said that he doesn’t think your average consumer is going to be coughing up money for news any time soon. Instead, he thinks that payments will come from content hubs and aggregators, including Digg itself.

One way Digg can help, Adelson said, is by helping these news sites with their advertising using techniques similar to the ones Digg has implemented. Adelson said that Digg Ads, the company’s recently launched ad product that lets users vote on the advertising they’re seeing, has been performing very well, generating high click through rates that the company “wasn’t expecting to see”. He later remarked that these ads were getting up to 100 times the click through rates that standard banner and text ads generate.

Adelson also said that the company has shifted gears a bit since the downturn hit last year — it’s now focused on growth rather than monetization. Adelson said that he’s “feeling good” that Digg is going to be profitable, and that reaching that goal is “not the problem any more”.

The interview closed out with a question about Digg’s future as an IPO candidate. Adelson says that he “has to go public at some point” both to please investors and to help out Digg’s employees, but that the time for that hasn’t come yet. However, Adelson did strongly hint that we’ll likely see Digg go international as the site looks to capitalize on the fact that 40% of its users are abroad despite the fact that Digg is only available in English.

Watch the latest business video at FOXBusiness.com

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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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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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The Associated Press is yapping again about the “exploitation of news” by search engines, news aggregators and, well, the Internet itself. The CEO of the AP, Tom Curley, told a media industry powwow in Beijing:

We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it.

I am temporarily lifting our ban on AP stories to make a point. The remarks seemed to be directed at Google, among others. But if you follow the link above, it will take you to an AP article hosted on Google. Is Google stealing it? No, Google already licenses stories from the AP, so it is already “supporting it.”

What’s really behind all the bluster is that the AP is in the midst of renegotiating a new licensing deal with Google, and is using vague public threats to try to get more money out of them. It’s really kind of sad. The AP is just so desperate for cash as its revenues begin to fade that it doesn’t know whether to brandish a stick or a carrot. Just the day before, Curley put out a trial balloon to see if search engines like Google would be willing to pay extra to get news delivered 20 to 30 minutes faster.

At press conference I attended on Wednesday, an AP reporter asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt what he thought about paying extra for 20-minute exclusives. Schmidt responded, “We have a contract with the AP. I don’t want to talk about a proposed service where we pay more.” In other words, he isn’t going to negotiate in public.

He didn’t sound too enthusiastic about the premium service anyway. “We have to be very careful not to favor one publisher over another,” he said. Exactly. The AP can go ahead and delay its news as much as it likes. The rest of us will be happy to fill in.

It wasn’t just the AP who was bashing the Web. Rupert Murdoch joined, railing against online “aggregators,” “plagiarists,” and “kelptomaniacs.” It is a tired refrain, and self-serving from someone who now wants to charge for online contenet. News organizations need to either evolve or die. Just today, one of Murdoch’s competitors, Hearst, launched its own news aggregator, LMK. Has Hearst joined the ranks of plagiarists too?

It’s funny. Both Curley and Murdoch were singing different tunes just a few years ago. But they have different agendas now.

Photo credit: Flickr/Quinn Dombrowski

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At D7 today, Kara Swisher sat down with Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington and Washington Post’s Digital Chief Katharine Weymouth to discuss a topic that has been beaten to death: old vs. new media. Much of the interview was spent massaging each other’s egos, with each praising the other for the quality of their respective publication’s journalism.

But Huffington spiced things up when Swisher broached the issue of monetization. Huffington denied that HuffPo would ever consider subscriptions, saying “We absolutely never imagine subscriptions. Unless you’re selling porn, and especially “very weird porn”, you shouldn’t sell subscriptions.” Swisher cited a Penn Schoen & Berland survey that found that 5% of people would pay for blogs and 92% of people don’t pay for online content today.

Subscriptions for news are a controversial subject to say the least. Rupert Murdoch said recently that News Corp. would start charging for access to many of its newspaper’s websites, citing the success of News Corp.-owned Wall Street Journal’s subscription model. News Corp. owns and operates over 110 newspapers worldwide.

Today, GigaOm announced GigaOm Pro, a subscription service for research and analysis created by analysts. Content includes briefings, notes, long views written by editorial team, quarterly wrap-ups, weekly updates on news, and curated links.

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MySpace parent company News Corp. continues to leak, off record, that Owen Van Natta is in the final stages of becoming the new CEO of MySpace (one of the more obvious candidates on our list yesterday). Van Natta certainly has the experience on paper to run the company - he was a business development executive at Amazon, the chief revenue officer at Facebook and most recently the CEO of music startup Playlist.com. If the leaks are correct, he’s in the final stages of contract negotiation and his hiring will be announced shortly.

He knows social networking, music/media and the Internet in general, and will certainly be able to get his hands around MySpace’s business. But his hiring is leaving many scratching their heads nonetheless.

Van Natta owns a significant percentage of Facebook stock and is of course intimately knowledgeable about their business. At the very least it’s bad form for him to join Facebook’s primary competitor. At worst there may be legal issues since it will be extremely difficult for him to continue to protect confidential Facebook information in his new job. But it’s widely known that Van Natta feels betrayed by Facebook for not making him the CEO and has a deep dislike of Mark Zuckerberg. The revenge factor in taking the top job at Facebook’s biggest competitor must be making him feel somewhat vindicated.

But…what about Playlist? He took the job just last November, less than six months ago. Investors are relying on him, as are employees, many of which he’s recruited since he joined. To walk away from that job so quickly doesn’t say much for his character. Perhaps there are unknown facts that mitigate the situation, but it doesn’t look good. As bad as Playlist’s business looks right now, the CEO has an obligation to investors and employees to see it through to the end and try to create a good outcome for the company.

At least Van Natta has tried MySpace, and even logged in a couple of days ago. He has six friends on the service and has uploaded a few pictures. His presumed new boss, Jonathan Miller, has yet to create a MySpace profile of his own.

This is actually the third time recently that Van Natta has interviewed for a MySpace-related job. He was a top candidate to lead MySpace Music, but his attempts to sell Playlist to the company as part of the deal left a bad taste in DeWolfe’s mouth. Van Natta also interviewed for the CEO Digital Media job that eventually went to Jonathan Miller.

The whole circus around MySpace this week settles a lot of scores: News Corp execs, long dismayed at DeWolfe’s close relationship with Rupert Murdoch, are gleefully leaking news around DeWolfe getting fired. The fact that they effectively announced Van Natta as the new CEO may have given them some immediate gratification, but it also puts him in a very strong negotiating position - if talks break down now News Corp. looks even more ridiculous than they already do. Van Natta gets his revenge on Facebook, but leaves his current company in terrible situation. And the MySpace executive team sits in stunned silence as they await news on which of them will still have a job next month, and who their new CEO will be.

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LookStat, an analytics platform for photographers that sell their work online in micro-stock marketplaces, has closed a $500,000 Series A funding round led by Founders Co-op.

Lookstat is a tool for photographers that allows them to track their earnings across online stock photography sites like iStockphoto, Shutterstock, and Dreamstime, with support for Fotolia, 123rf, and Stockxpert coming in the near future. The site can automatically identify when the same image is being sold at multiple sites, and can aggregate all sales for that image into one place. Lookstat is also currently tested a workflow platform designed to help photographs distribute their content.

While the site is currently free, it will eventually begin to charge a subscription free, though it will likely remain free for any photographers who earn less than $100/month.

While LookStat may be addressing a niche market, it’s one that is growing steadily. In February we saw Fotolia reach one million registered members, with 1.5 million paid downloads a month (Comscore currently reports that they have over 2.8 million unique visitors). Competitor iStockphoto, which was purchased by Getty Images in 2006, gets over 4.8 million monthly visitors.

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Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute, a seed stage incubator and mentoring program that we first covered last month, is set to release a set of legal documents this afternoon that promise to protect startup founders from, as he eloquently puts it, the “atrocities of investors.”

The new documents, created by Wilson Sonsini attorney Yoichiro Taku, are posted publicly on the website. They have a variety of novel rights and privileges:

• Creation of a Class F Founders stock that has 2:1 board votes per founder and 10:1 voting power over normal common stock. These shares vest monthly without a cliff and have single trigger acceleration. Class F holders get acceleration on change in control and approval rights on new investments, liquidity events, Board size, and dividends.
• A clause that requires the payment of $100,000 to the Founders Institute in the event a founder leaves the board of directors to give a disincentive to firing founders down the road.
• Grant of a warrant to the Founders Institute to buy 3.5% of the fully diluted stock of the company in the form of the equity sold in the first round of financing, which is pooled for participating founders and mentors.

The stock grants and any penalty fees paid are put into an exchange fund that all participating founders have ownership in. Therefore, all companies participating in each class have some stock in all the other companies - a great way to reduce overall risk. One big winner in each class means everyone gets a little bit rich. 60% of the warrant stock goes to the founders, the institute keeps the other 40%.

There’s a risk that these extremely favorable founder terms could create problems when the companies try to raise outside funding. Ressi says they won’t let a financing die from these terms and will likely waive rights if forced to. His reputation will require that - if these agreements protect founders he’ll be a hero, but if they kill financing deals the program will collapse.

Applications for the first startup class are open until May 10.

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