In response to Rupert Murdoch (CEO of Fox News) announcing that he’s considering removing all of NewsCorp’s news from Google and put it all up on Microsoft’s Bing… Seth Godin has summed it up pretty much right on the money:
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.
Essentially what this means is that Microsoft would pay Murdoch for exclusive rights to list his newsfeed content on the Bing search engine. What he hasn’t thought about is what is in the best interests of the consumer… I use google reader to aggregate all the news feeds I subscribe to. If this were to go forward, I’d have to use Bing to view any news that has been paid to be listed exclusively on Microsoft’s service…. No sir, I don’t like it – I don’t like it one bit.
