The News Media Has Had Enough...Maybe

When the Internet just got out of diapers (15 years ago) it was a relatively bland whitewashed wall of information. There was some texture to the wall (the world of AOL maybe) but it was just a plain old whitewashed wall. No matter how many brush marks new Internet companies made it was just more white on white.

Then a new color came along that stood out on the wall. It was the color Google. Google made a huge bright brush mark and kept adding more and more brush marks all over the wall. The Internet began to revolve around Google and by the time the company sailed past $700 per share, it had mastered Pay Per Click ad revenue, made print media (and even their online versions) largely irrelevant, frustrated even Microsoft, and basically convinced all of us that if your web presence or Internet plan did not involve the color Google, there was no point in even getting on the wall. White just wasn’t going to stand out.

The trouble is there have been so many Google brush marks made, the whole wall is now the color Google. No one can really stand out by using a Google colored brush anymore. So it’s no surprise that big media doesn't like the color Google (and hasn’t seen much of a profit because of it either).

Recently, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp announced that he just might block search engines from crawling content. He is already doing this to a certain extent with the Wall Street Journal which News Corp owns. Given News Corp is just about the biggest content generator of big media, this just might be a brush stroke that screams a new color up against the solid Google colored Internet. He offers in his interview with Sky News editor David Speers that the fact that search brings high numbers of unique visitors to News Corps’ sites does not mean there is revenue being generated.

Wasn’t high traffic with low (or no) revenue the basis of the “dot com boom” and then the “dot gone bust” of 2000? Is the average company making that high a return off their PPC and organic search efforts (even if people are being driven to their site)? There’s a lot more to conversion than being found yet being found remains our prime directive in the world of Google. "There is no advertising, there is SEO."

A New Color

But even Murdoch’s actions may be just a nudge. It will take the rest of big media and then all the smaller media properties out there to decide they do NOT want to be found by Google for a paradigm shift to occur. Still, it’s an 800 pound gorilla doing the nudging.

NOT Wanting to Be Found

Imagine NOT wanting to be found by Google being in vogue. You would see an increase in news directory sites for the smaller media players. There would be more direct accessing of large media sites since we all know how to find the likes of CNN without Google. Currently on mobile phones, everything from USA Today to Fox News is set up in an old fashioned menu (n.k.a. Bookmarks). When I’m on my Blackberry, I don’t use Google to find news. I go to the news sites directly.

It’s nothing to imagine that your current focus and efforts (and obsession) on your company’s PPC or search engine optimization might give way considerably to old fashioned advertising on sites where people may have to go to find news -- the news sites themselves. And of course social media profiles of the news media are becoming better and more widespread along with their targeted blogs and other content that will remain searchable.

So once there is a critical mass, will there be organic and paid search within huge media sites? Will Google’s business model go from direct PPC revenues to renting out its search algorithm and a set of PPC software suites to high volume sites? Will such advertising then necessarily get cheaper for the average business? My God, will the AOL portal come back from the dead?

It’s tough to tell which form the new paradigm will take. But consider the Internet is still so young, that there is no real way to stand out now making small Google colored brush marks against a solid Google colored wall (and no money in it either for news media), and that even Microsoft can display chinks in its armor in the fast changing world of the Internet. There is every possibility that a new color will get put up on the wall which just might spread and cover up some of the color Google.