Cameron Hulett, senior vice president of publisher solutions at Acceleration, discusses News Corp’s indexing war, Google’s five click strategy, and explains what publishers can do to claw back control of their content.
Over the past few months the future survival of the newspaper and magazine publishing industry has been a topic of hot debate. At the heart of it is the ongoing battle about whether consumers should pay for their content online. At the same time media baron Rupert Murdoch put the spotlight on who should earn advertising revenue from content with his outspoken comments about Google and how its searches link directly to newspaper articles by bypassing publishers completely.
Since Murdoch’s comments, it’s been reported News Corp has spoken with Microsoft about possibly exclusively indexing its news on Bing and barring Google from access to its stories. Almost simultaneously Google offered something of an olive branch to publishers. It will now allow them to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through the search engine to five articles a day before being routed to registration or payment pages on the publisher’s website.
While these developments are interesting, what does it mean for the industry, and how can publishers regain control of their content?
The indexing war
What Google has proposed to publishers has been available in similar form for a long time. They’ve had the option to de-index for a long time, and subscription-based websites have been able to close the backdoor on users entering their sites for a long while – it’s just that publishers have never really gone down either route before.
In essence we think what Murdoch has done with News Corp is to cleverly disrupt the market. Playing Google off against Bing does just that and allows Murdoch to get back the advertising revenue generated from content. He can then evaluate how he can get the most accumulative revenue by adding his own ad revenue to the revenue share he could get from Bing. While this is easier for bigger publishing houses to do, the smaller publishers have no choice but to continue to be indexed on Google and other search engines. The smaller publishers will simply have to wait for the larger publishers to set a new precedent.
Take Google’s search market share: for example Hitwise revealed in October that Google has 71.08 per cent of the market, with the rest being split among Yahoo! and Bing. Therefore it would be ludicrous for the smaller players to close off their content on Google (and other search engines), especially when you consider the massive role search engines play in directing web users to publishers’ stories and adverts.
So what of Google’s five click strategy?
Google is simply allowing publishers and website owners to limit the number of times visitors can access their websites for free through Google to five times per day. This strategy won’t change things all that much for publishers and web users. People will still tend to leverage the search engines for content and avoid paying wherever possible.
So while Google has put out this olive branch to publishers, it still doesn’t really solve the main issue associated with who earns money from paid content. Small publishers should leverage the search engines, not fight them. Surely it’s a good thing if Google, or any search engine for that matter, directs relevant people to your site where they can read your stories and see your advertisers’ adverts. But what you need to do on top of that is differentiate what visitors see when they get to you.
How can publishers claw back control of their audiences then?
Right now publisher content is still in an old fashion form – i.e. straight text and pictures, with some video. That made it very easy for the Googles of the world to aggregate and disseminate the exact same information. And Google took hold so fast that publishers lost control of their content. So to claw back control, publishers need to repackage their content to create a differentiated user experience – and they will need to use new formats and distribution channels to spark this change.
Consider the soon to be launched Apple Tablet (or iSlate), which will support an entirely new digital magazine format. No search engine can replicate this new user experience, which will be controlled by the publisher. Apple will need to have deals with the publishers to place this highly repackaged content on the tablet. This creates a natural alliance and revenue share model, which is far more advantageous for publishers than the current model they have with search engines. These new channels will then force the search engines to share revenue – exactly the game Murdoch is forcing with Bing and Google.
So while the index war goes on and publishers debate about whether they should charge for their content, it’s really going to be those who embrace new delivery formats and who can provide their readers with a differentiated user experience who will succeed. Get this right and the search engines will work for you rather than you for them.
