Maybe Murdoch isn’t nuts about blocking Google

by drm on November 10, 2009

Rupert Murdoch declares he’s going to shun Google.

Google says, We don’t care.

The world cries out that Rupert is misguided.

An enterprising blogger goes onto Compete.com’s site and tries to sort out just how dependent Murdoch’s web properties are on Google’s traffic. His answer? Not as dependent as it might seem:

Screen shot 2009-11-10 at 9.27.30 AM.jpgThe screenshot to the right shows the News Corp. assets for which Google is the top referrer, and News Corp. assets for which other sites are the top referrer.

The conclusion is that News Corp. is as reliant on Google traffic one might assume, and, as blogger Vedrashko observes, is less reliant than other news sites on Google.

A look at ComScore’s source/loss analysis for the Wall Street Journal support Vedrashko’s observations. Of WSJ.com’s 6.7 million unique visitors in September, 30% came from Yahoo, with 70% of the Yahoo traffic being driven from Yahoo’s home page. 13% of WSJ.com traffic was driven by Google search.

One other interesting note from the Compete figures: the biggest referrer of traffic to MySpace is Facebook.

Also, don’t miss Mark Cuban weighing in on the issue.

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  • It's a web, a network. Trying to segment it, block it out, is a fools errand and will lead to serious and unintended repercussions. Looking only at referral logs is a recipe for disaster... sure Google may only drive 13% of a given site's traffic, but the search engine's influence is latent in every other referral site on the list. Not acknowledging that is serious mistake.
  • Unless, of course, they want to pay for every piece of traffic. Three things drive web traffic: your Google juice, your social graph and paid promotion, either with online marketing or offline marketing. The print brands count as paid promotion. My first thought -- along with a lot of other people -- when I saw Murdoch's comment was that he didn't know what he was talking about. Looking at the data, I realize they probably have got a logic behind the statement, as misguided as it might be.
  • Whether there's a logic at work or not - doing business on the internet while blocking Google is like putting out a magazine without using the USPS - possible yes, wise...?
  • Your comment made me smile.... You can put out a magazine without the postal service, just like we do with our home and apartment rental catalogs. You just find ways to get your product in front of people as they go about their daily business, and when they pick it up, they'll have more value as prospects. That's not to disagree with your point about the danger of disintermediating Google.
  • Yeah... as soon as that came rolling off my finger tips I thought of at least half a dozen ways to do a mag with out USPS ;)
  • tdubner
    I still think that Google should move into the content creation business. We know that organizing publicly available content was the backbone of directory publishing. If you are Google, why not extend your publishing reach into editorial content.

    If Google put $250mm to $500mm behind a Google News brand with their own newsroom, they could take the bulk of the online news profits from the newspaper industry. They would just use their universal search capability as their primary distribution network.
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