A fascinating fight is brewing between the emperor of the internet world, Google, and the mughals of (slowly dying, per some experts) traditional news industry.
It all started a few days ago, when Ruport Murdoch in an interview, told that they might decide to disallow search engines to index their news sites. He even went on to accuse Google, MSNs of the world that they were "stealing our stories". He is hinting towards pay-to-read kind of a model, though many people find that this business model may never take off.
Taking the cue, at the world news paper congress in Hyderabad, early this month, attacked Google and called it the digital vampire and kleptomaniac. The sudden bullishness seem to be coming in from change in the way the information is consumed - twitter for breaking news and facebook for reading content and watching video. There is some merit in the new found aggression from the traditional news industry. There are 350mn facebook users and 55mn users for Twitter and these two can be used as a counter against Google.
Google obviously is watching. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google striked back in a hard hitting article in Wall Street Journal (incidentally owned by Murdoch). He puts the ball back and said that with dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame. He argued that Google is a great source of promotion, in that it sends 100,000 opportunities a minute to the news industry.
Where does it leave me and you? Time will tell and as of now I'm willing to bet that except for niche content (like Harward Business Review for example), pure news continue to be "free". What do you think?
Thank you very much,
RamP!
ramp.ramp@gmail.com
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