Has Rupert Murdoch Done a Deal With the Devil?

“I’m not saying I beat the devil …but I drank his beer for nothing” – Kris Kristofferson

It is not for me to validate or otherwise the persistent rumor that Rupert Murdoch is in fact the devil incarnate. However, he is certainly accusing Google of drinking his beer for nothing.

It appears, according to Rupert, that every time Google index his content in their search engine, they are behaving like “content kleptomaniacs.”

“The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement towards paid content, it will be the content creators – the people in this hall – who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph,” – Rupert Murdoch

Of course, you have to ask yourself the question: Why doesn’t Murdoch just request the Google spiders not to index his content in the first place? A few simple edits to any website  is all it takes. Any tech savvy 14 year old kid could do the job. Perhaps News Corp should hire one and that would solve the problem.

No. there must be something else going on. This whole thing doesn’t make any sense.

Others are falling over each other to get displayed prominently on Google. In fact, a whole “search engine optimization (SEO)” industry has being spawned to help companies do just that.

And here is Rupert saying that he wants none of this. He does not want searchers to find his content via Google. He is not interested in the 100.000 clicks per minute that Google can send his way. Very strange.

My instinct tells me that when something doesn’t make sense, you just have to walk around it and walk around it …and look at it from every angle, until it does make sense. It eventually will.

In the words of yet another rock icon.

“It all makes perfect sense expressed in dollars and cents…[and] pounds, shillings and pence” – Roger Waters, Pink Floyd

Yep, showing my age yet again. But that is another story.

Getting back to Rupert. It is clear that there is something else going on.

The man is not silly. He didn’t get to be  a billionaire – the “man who owns the news” by being dumb.

Admittedly, there are times when smart people do dumb things.

Or maybe he is just misinformed about how this whole search engine thing works and how he can use it to his advantage. This doesn’t seem likely. I am sure that he has a lot of very savvy advisors, tearing their hair out, hoping he will see the light. If anything, it maybe that he is just not listening.

Or could it be that he has teamed up with that other alleged force of evil – Microsoft?

Now if that were the case, it would be hard to pick, which was the devil and which was the one doing the deal. In the eyes of the masses, they both have pretty impressive track records when it comes to being the “evilist” empire of all. Again, not for me to judge who would win that little duel.

But, at least on the surface, a deal with Microsoft would make some sort of marginal sense.

News Corp attacks Google but quietly does some sort of backroom deal with Googles’ nemesis, Microsoft.

Yes, maybe there is the guts of a deal in that one.

But,  I am not buying it. At least not yet.

My money is on the theory that Rupert is just being plain bloody minded. I reckon he is just not listening to his advisors. The man is 78 for chrissakes – he has earned the right to just dig  in and be downright unreasonable.

He has done his shirt on MySpace. This whole Internet thing has been a total pain in the butt.  Now is the time to take a stand – he would be thinking to himself.

Pity the poor advisors – scurrying off to work out some sort of battle plan that will make him happy -  and still have some remote chance of working commercially.

“We’ve got a plan…a cunning plan…a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel” – Rowan Atkinson

Sooner or later a cunning plan will emerge – as if they had planned it all along.  They will have to come up with something – if for no other reason than to save face.

I think you will find that the devil is in the detail. I just don’t think that Rupert’s boys have worked out the detail yet.

What do you think?

Breaking News: Confirmation that a deal with the devil may be underway. According to the Financial Times – 22 Nov 2009

Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact

By Matthew Garrahan in Los Angeles, Richard Waters in San Francisco and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in New York

Published: November 22 2009 23:01 | Last updated: November 22 2009 23:01

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

So there are you are. We were on the right track with today’s earlier post.

So what do you think now? Does Murdoch have any chance of making this thing fly?

Latest Update – Nov 23rd 2009

Trust Seth Godin to come up with the absolute best blogpost on the Murdoch/Microsoft farce

Rupert Murdoch has it backwards

“You don’t charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them.

If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention”. – Seth Godin

Latest Update – July 20th 2011 – Rupert Does “Reverse Ferret” over Hacking Scandal

According to Wikipedia, Reverse Ferret is a phrase used predominantly within the British media to describe a sudden about face in an organization’s editorial line on a certain issue.

Sound familiar?

Apparently the term originated at The Sun in regard to the role of journalists when it came to public figures. The objective was to “stick a ferret up their trousers”. This meant making their lives extremely uncomfortable.

This, in turn, was based on on the northern sport of Ferret Legging where contestants compete to see who can withstand a live ferret down their sealed trouser legs the longest.

So it appears that Rupert and co are reversing this particular little hacking ferret at lightning speed.

Let’s hope the ferret doesn’t escape across the Atlantic. It could run amok at Fox News.