Bing tries to buy the news, says TechCrunch.
Microsoft is dangling money before Murdoch if he will stop being googled and let his websites be searched by Bing only.
The talks are still at a very early stage and it isn't clear whether they cover only Murdoch newspapers or MySpace and Fox television as well, says the Wall Street Journal.
No matter what, Bing has a long way to go before it catches up with Google. The Christian Science Monitor reported last week:
According to comScore, Bing’s US market share rose from from 9.4 percent in September to to 9.9 percent in October. During that same span, Google climbed from 64.9 percent to 65.4 percent.
The loser on the October leaderboard was Yahoo, which sunk from 18.8 percent in September to 18 percent in October.
Bing was first unveiled in late May, the Monitor reminds, so it's off to a good start.
But Google provides so many online services — and does it better than Microsoft — that it's hard to see how any young upstart can close the gap any time soon.
The Silicon Alley Insider says:
FT reports that Google’s UK director Matt Brittin told a conference last week that Google did not need news content to survive.
“Economically it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue,” he said.
And, even if Murdoch blocks Google, stories from the Wall Street Journal and The Times and other Murdoch media will still be picked up by Google from other websites.
Bing may gain some market share from a Murdoch deal, "but we doubt it", says the Silicon Alley Insider.
John Gapper at the Financial Times, nevertheless, thinks it could be "a pivotal moment in internet economics". He writes:
Mr Murdoch appears to be willing to sacrifice a lot of traffic to the websites of papers such as the Wall Street Journal and The Times in return for a payment from Microsoft. In effect, he would be swapping his revenue stream from online advertising with a payment from Microsoft for drawing visitors to Bing.
That suggests one of two things: either… he is getting old and does not “get” the internet, or he has looked at the figures and decided that Google traffic is not worth very much. Personally, I think the latter is more plausible.
Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review did some calculations and suggested that the Journal gets less than $12m a year in advertising to people who come to its site through Google, although it accounts for 23 per cent of the Journal’s traffic…
If the revenue from search traffic is low, why not swap it for something else?
If you click on the Wall Street Journal link, you will notice this news is brought to you by Google.
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