Twitter references bring pageviews, while Google News brings .. nothing?
I doubt (have no proof though, would be interested in numbers) that a considerable percentage of visits to a news site is from search engines. One data point: I don't remember when I last googled my way into a news article.
While it's true that I probably wouldn't search for "xyz Wall Street Journal article" I might be searching for xyz topic and happen upon a result in the WSJ
I rather did read the article. If you can get traffic from Twitter, why would you cut off getting traffic from Google?
"he doesn't make money from Google's indexing of his content"
How does he make money from Twitter users posting his content? The only way he makes money from Twitter is traffic, and Google also drives traffic. Therefore how does it make sense to cut off a source of traffic?
Ok, as clueless as he is, not even Mark Cuban can believe Twitter and Facebook live updates are going to supplant search engines. They serve completely different purposes. Traffic from each source is almost completely independent of the other. The traffic you lose from Google News might be made up by Twitter, but it is never going to make up for the loss of Google organic search results.
It is also ironic how each news outlet is so enthusiastic about their competitors blocking Google. They know they would just get their competitor's traffic for free.
This jumping on the Rupert Murdoch saber-rattling bandwagon is getting old really quick. I will believe the viability of their alternative business models when I see one of these media moguls actually block Google in their robots.txt file.
It makes me wonder: Does he even talk to people outside the tech industry? 90% of people I know that aren't in software/technology think that Twitter is a retarded fad. While I don't agree with that, they have an enormous amount of credibility building to do within the non-technical community.
I don't care if CNN or Fox News reads tweets during their "news" broadcasts. Twitter already has a retention problem, and Walter J. McTraditionalbusinessman isn't signing up for a Twitter account because Rupert Murdoch won't let Google index his results. He'll just search Google, and not find the WSJ's articles.
edit: To be fair, you don't need to be a twitter user to view public tweets. I do think, however, there is a general skepticism about the service that won't end soon in the business world.
Plus, why does twitterpose no threat to News Corp? it still sends readers directly to the article without losing time on the homepage. So, in what really is it different from Google?
It would be rather controversial for me. Twitter search (at least on twitters site) is rather unsophisticated in the way it determines relevance. You have to wade through a pile of retweets to find anything truly useful.
Google news (or other sites like oneriot) do a great job of parsing through ALL of the available news outlets on a pretty quick basis. At the end of the day you end up in the same place (tweets are nothing but pointers to 'real' content in most cases), but I find it's much more efficient to utilize a more sophisticated search tool.
Put me squarely in the camp that the value of twitter is nothing more than ego stoking.
I don't use Twitter, I think it's a useless fad. But for real-time news, it's hard to argue that it isn't better than Google. It's not perfect, but looking at the trending hashtags tells you something Google can't.
I've heard it a million times and for hopefully the last time: FB/Twitter will not replace Google. As much as the social networking fundies would love to see that happen.
This is a huge blunder on Murdoch's part - as if Fox was reporting news in the first place. Good riddens.
I think this guy misses Rupert's point entirely. Rupert doesn't want the random people that are coming from search engines, or twitter to use his sites. He wants the people that click on his news sites everyday to pay a subscription.
And yes the writer highly over values the importance of twitter. Twitter is good for trends, but to lead users to specific links or sites, like a search engine does based on popularity or relevancy.. is not the same. When a event occurs unless you're one of the first new sites to break it, you'll get thousands of news sites links with the same content.
No, both of you miss the point. Rupert wants an audience. That is why he bought myspace. He talks about loyalty, but no so much that people are loyal to the newspaper, but he wants someone to stay on his properties the same way that when you buy a newspaper, you'd pour through every page. By simply making content premium, cognitively the reader is going to value the content more, thus making the reader stay longer. You see this with biz opp ebooks etc. Most information is freely available elsewhere, but the ones that get read are the ones people actually paid something for.
"The concept of “If the news is important, it will find me” works better by the day. If it matters to me, chances are very good its in one of the twitter feeds I follow."
As with most people who use the Internet primarily to reinforce their own worldview, Mark Cuban must have the intellectual curiosity of a card-carrying dittohead. He and Murdoch deserve each other.
Eh. People who read sites like his aren't searching for news, they're searching for their current views to be reenforced. Google news isn't good for that anyway (though Twitter can be). Might as well cut off the accidental readership.
The point that both Cuban and Murdoch are missing I think is the shelf life of news content isn't limited to only breaking news. For example I check a particular news site everyday but maybe 30 or 40% of the content interests me right now. I may be interested in the other 60-70% later but how am I going to find it without Google? I'm obviously not going to individually search a bunch of sites. That's why search engines exist in the first place -- no one wants to do that.
real time news is just a preference. The market segment for that preference and for people who know how to get real time news from the various tools is still very small.There are still millions of other people who prefer the old way that google caters to.
News corp getting rid of google and using facebook and twitter instead to drive traffic is dumb.They will block out millions of internet users in the process.
The only thing I agree with about marks blog is that twitter and facebook are not threats because they do not compete with newscorp news properties in the destination site space.
One thing that struck me about twitter is that the mainstream media pushed it (e.g. Oprah). That never happened with Google.
I got the sense that the mainstream media felt that they could work with Twitter, and so of course they promoted it like crazy. This article suggests one reason why that might be: it's not a competitor to media, but more like the word of mouth that mainstream media is accustomed to handling.
Whereas Google solved a problem (of endless masses of information of unknown relevance) that had never existed before. It solved a geek problem, not a mainstream problem.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 74.3 ms ] threadI doubt (have no proof though, would be interested in numbers) that a considerable percentage of visits to a news site is from search engines. One data point: I don't remember when I last googled my way into a news article.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS345US...
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS345US...
While it's true that I probably wouldn't search for "xyz Wall Street Journal article" I might be searching for xyz topic and happen upon a result in the WSJ
"he doesn't make money from Google's indexing of his content"
How does he make money from Twitter users posting his content? The only way he makes money from Twitter is traffic, and Google also drives traffic. Therefore how does it make sense to cut off a source of traffic?
It is also ironic how each news outlet is so enthusiastic about their competitors blocking Google. They know they would just get their competitor's traffic for free.
This jumping on the Rupert Murdoch saber-rattling bandwagon is getting old really quick. I will believe the viability of their alternative business models when I see one of these media moguls actually block Google in their robots.txt file.
I don't care if CNN or Fox News reads tweets during their "news" broadcasts. Twitter already has a retention problem, and Walter J. McTraditionalbusinessman isn't signing up for a Twitter account because Rupert Murdoch won't let Google index his results. He'll just search Google, and not find the WSJ's articles.
edit: To be fair, you don't need to be a twitter user to view public tweets. I do think, however, there is a general skepticism about the service that won't end soon in the business world.
He wasn't suggesting that! Just that Twitter is already a better source than Google for real-time news...not a very new or controversial statement.
Google news (or other sites like oneriot) do a great job of parsing through ALL of the available news outlets on a pretty quick basis. At the end of the day you end up in the same place (tweets are nothing but pointers to 'real' content in most cases), but I find it's much more efficient to utilize a more sophisticated search tool.
Put me squarely in the camp that the value of twitter is nothing more than ego stoking.
This is a huge blunder on Murdoch's part - as if Fox was reporting news in the first place. Good riddens.
And yes the writer highly over values the importance of twitter. Twitter is good for trends, but to lead users to specific links or sites, like a search engine does based on popularity or relevancy.. is not the same. When a event occurs unless you're one of the first new sites to break it, you'll get thousands of news sites links with the same content.
As with most people who use the Internet primarily to reinforce their own worldview, Mark Cuban must have the intellectual curiosity of a card-carrying dittohead. He and Murdoch deserve each other.
hmm....
News corp getting rid of google and using facebook and twitter instead to drive traffic is dumb.They will block out millions of internet users in the process.
The only thing I agree with about marks blog is that twitter and facebook are not threats because they do not compete with newscorp news properties in the destination site space.
I got the sense that the mainstream media felt that they could work with Twitter, and so of course they promoted it like crazy. This article suggests one reason why that might be: it's not a competitor to media, but more like the word of mouth that mainstream media is accustomed to handling.
Whereas Google solved a problem (of endless masses of information of unknown relevance) that had never existed before. It solved a geek problem, not a mainstream problem.