Is a nice explanation, if you give people powerful tools they'll use the past of 'least cost' to get what they need.
If that path bypasses all your carefully created obstructions that allow you to monetize the traffic then that's a real problem.
Imagine the owners of a free themepark that have a toll road to their themepark, and you have to use it. Along the toll road are large billboards, lots of them.
Then one day some guy invents a teleportation device that allows people to zap straight in to the heart of your themepark, and back out again with 0 effort.
Just like water with a bit of help from gravity will find the path of least resistance, so do your users.
The solution, is to make it even easier to find the content that users are looking for, and to make sure that that is a way that is monetizable.
Blocking out google is going to simply drive all those users elsewhere, it will be to them as though Murdochs sites no longer exist. And that may actually be a good thing.
Unless you've got a unique selling proposition, that is. Murdoch doesn't.
A magazine like Cook's or the Economist can charge for access, because they offer writing that's leagues beyond the norm. The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, is a good paper, by it offers nothing that I can't find elsewhere. It's certainly not a Top 5 news source for me. So people likely won't notice if the WSJ disappears from Google.
Murdoch is smart, one of the brightest men alive, but here for the first time in decades he's met a system smarter than he is. On a level playing field he's a shark, but he is no longer a holder of a primary source of power. I forget who wrote yesterday that the Internet isn't about content, it's about access nodes, but they were spot-on. Murdoch can crush wtb content, but he doesn't own nodes and he doesn't understand them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_foraging
Is a nice explanation, if you give people powerful tools they'll use the past of 'least cost' to get what they need.
If that path bypasses all your carefully created obstructions that allow you to monetize the traffic then that's a real problem.
Imagine the owners of a free themepark that have a toll road to their themepark, and you have to use it. Along the toll road are large billboards, lots of them.
Then one day some guy invents a teleportation device that allows people to zap straight in to the heart of your themepark, and back out again with 0 effort.
Just like water with a bit of help from gravity will find the path of least resistance, so do your users.
The solution, is to make it even easier to find the content that users are looking for, and to make sure that that is a way that is monetizable.
Blocking out google is going to simply drive all those users elsewhere, it will be to them as though Murdochs sites no longer exist. And that may actually be a good thing.