Murdoch madness. I’ve had a fair number of press calls on the Murdoch/Bing sillliness and here are the points I’ve been making: Were Bing to pay News Corp. to drop Google, it would be a double-play in Google’s favor: Microsoft would lose money and gain little.
News Corp. would lose traffic, shifting away from the search engine with more than 60% penetration in the U.S. and more than 80% in the U.K. to one that has 10 percent here – and that’s just the search engine; it doesn’t account for the disparate popularity of Google and Bing News. See this post: WSJ.com would lose 25% of its inbound web traffic, according to Hitwise, which also says that 15% of the people who come to WSJ.com on the web come from Google immediately prior and 12% come from Google News.
Would Google be hurt? The True Meaning of MSFT-NEWS - Continuations. NSFW: The Madness of King Rupert – I Admit, I Was Wrong About Mu. Never let it be said that I don’t admit when I’m wrong.
I mean, granted, I don’t particularly like being wrong – and I especially don’t like being wrong in the full glare of the public spotlight. But on the vanishingly small number of occasions when – due to some inexplicable glitch in the universe – I happen to be wrong, never let it be said that I don’t admit it. A case in point… I just stumbled across an excellent post by biographer TJ Stiles, calling me out over my claim that hardback books are a ‘cash cow’ for the publishing industry.”Let’s set the record straight,” said Mr Stiles, “publishers (and authors) make much more money from hardcovers, it’s true. That is one reason why they have always delayed the release of cheaper paperbacks.