[WikiEN-l] BBC blog on WSJ study

[Durova]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 7:07 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Charles Matthews
> <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > Carcharoth wrote:
> >> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Carcharoth <
> carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > Anyone else feel that Mr. Murdoch's little list beginning "1. Trash
> > Google rather than actually noindex News Corp's pages" has Wikipedia as
> > alternate new source somewhere on it?
>
> That's a bit too cryptic for me. I know a little about Murdoch and his
> stable of media publications, but not sure what the tie-up is with
> Google and Wikipedia.
>

Mr. Murdoch wants to shift to a paid access model for online the online
versions of his news holdings.  He's negotiating a deal with Microsoft's
search engine toward that purpose.

It's hard to understand the conjecture that Wikipedia ties in with those
plans.  If anything, Wikipedia's habit of referencing historic news articles
would help Mr. Murdoch's bottom line because it sends traffic to old
articles, which can generate advertising revenue from old news that would
otherwise be valueless.

If he's right about paid access being the most profitable model, then his
self interest would be best served by fencing new content within a paid
access only for a brief time: a week at most.  By that time it becomes old
news and there's more money to be made through advertising.  Successive
release to different venues is standard practice within the entertainment
industry: a film starts with theatrical release, and once that exhausts
itself it goes to cable, DVD and network television in descending order of
profitability.

If this is his plan and it becomes the news industry standard then it could
make breaking news less burdensome upon Wikipedia's administrators: fewer
people will read the news immediately and edit Wikipedia.  Of course
Wikipedia might also be the wrench in his plans because he can't prevent his
readers from updating Wikipedia, significant news readership would shift to
Wikipedia, and we have no reason to stop being a free venue.  Perhaps that
was Charles's intended inference?

-Durova

-- 
http://durova.blogspot.com/