News Corp. Flirts with Bing
The recent news that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is considering a pull out of its news from Google and creating an exclusive news deal with Microsoft’s Bing search engine is intriguing. This is the first major move from leading news organization to potentially begin charging for their news. The current industry practice for most news providers is to give it way for free online, including distribution on the search engines.
This is a smart move for Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, as it provides added value to his “new and improved” search engine Bing. Converting MSN to Bing was also a smart move as Bing has picked up some market share. The News Corp. exclusive could add more value to the Bing property and help increase their share.
Having said that, one has to also pause and wonder whether Google is threatened by this move. I don’t think so.
The key to Google’s whopping 65% market share (and 70% by some estimates) is not the offering of free news. That’s a nice added benefit but not a driving force.
The driving force is Google’s extraordinary commitment to, and delivery of, a high quality user experience. They have spent years honing their speed and accuracy in delivering answers to a search engine user’s queries. At the moment, there is no one better doing this and that is why they hold their dominant share in spite of competitor innovation.
We still continue to place most of our client budgets on Google, but we also see roles for Bing and Yahoo in those buys. This could change in the future, but that decision will be primarily driven by further innovation of the search engine user experience.
One last note. There are some who speculate that Murdoch’s discussions with MS’ Bing are really a negotiating ploy to create fear in Google’s corporate suite, and thereby, move them to pay News Corp. a fee for their news feeds. Given Google’s devotion to the user experience as the ultimate driver of their business, I doubt the recent events will make them nervous.
