Evil Empires? Microsoft May Pay Murdoch To Leave Google For Bing

After enduring mountains of mockery at the hands of bloggers for saying he wants to get his sites off Google, word has gotten out that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is in talks with Microsoft. Talks that involve taking News Corp content off of Google and putting it on Bing. And getting paid for it. Who doesn’t understand the Internet now?

According to the Financial Times, negotiations are “at an early stage,” but there seems to be a real interest on Microsoft’s end. In fact, Murdoch’s comments may have helped bring a broader Bing strategy for sticking it to Google out into the open:

The Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine…

…Microsoft’s interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content.

“This is all about Microsoft hurting Google’s margins,” said the web publisher who is familiar with the plan.

But the biggest beneficiary of the tussle could be the newspaper industry, which has yet to construct a reliable online business model that adequately replaces declining print and advertising revenues.

None of this is a jaw-dropping surprise. Well before the Financial Times’ story got out, Jeff Jarvis and Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan analyzed the “blocking Google” approach for News Corporation and other web publishers and concluded that it would hurt the publishers far more than it would hurt Google (Jarvis) and that exclusive deals wouldn’t help Bing much either (Sullivan).

As Sullivan points out, a few years ago, “virtually all major news publications in Belgium … opted-out of Google;” when Google shrugged and let them go without incurring much damage, they quickly came back and begged to be reindexed.

If Bing is seriously considering this deal, it’s counting on exerting a greater pressure on Google than precedents like these would seem to indicate is likely — which isn’t to say that Bing is wrong. Either way, if Murdoch can squeeze a few million more out of Microsoft for content that was going to appear somewhere on the web either way, it will just go to show that the older ways of business he knows best still mean a lot in the online marketplace, however many web futurists that annoys.

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