Friday, November 13, 2009

Rupert Murdoch is a dinosaur

I read an article on CNN.com talking about how Rupert Murdoch is planning on taking all of News Corp's websites off of search engines like google. The reason, he claims, is that google is stealing his news. In addition to removing his sites from these search engines, he is also planning on making websites like the Wall Street Journal subscription based. What? Really?
First of all sites like google aren't "stealing your news" they are linking people directly to your website, secondly News Corp as a whole doesn't have anything special to offer that you can't get somewhere else online for free. There was a time when the Wall Street Journal was something special but that ended roughly around the same time that Rupert Murdoch bought it and reformatted it to a People magazine clone. It seems like Rupert has reached the end of his rope in the online market. He is well known for owning My space which coincidentally is expected to go under soon as it is losing lots of users to Face book. What does Murdoch do about it? He smears Face book in the wall street journal saying that it is detrimental to people leading healthy social lives. Wow. It's amazing that such mud throwing made it passed grade school.
Okay Mr. Murdoch, you might have been able to build one of the largest media empires in the world a few years back, but you are about to bring it back down to where you started from. Since when is it a good idea to revert back to out-dated business models like charging for Internet content that is free everywhere else? I could understand if he offered something that others do not, but he doesn't. Good lord this man is a dinosaur! He really can't seem to move forward and adapt to the times and like a dinosaur, he and his company are going to go extinct if they don't evolve quickly.
Granted, I could rant about Rupert's poor business sense concern the future of mass media all day, but here is the real kicker: Rupert Murdoch flat out said that he understands that this move will significantly decrease the amount of visitors that he has to these sites, but the kind of people who would get to his site through google aren't the kind of readers he needs.
I think I'm going to leave it at that before I have an aneurysm from all the blood rushing rushing to my head.
Rupert Murdoch-avoid falling meteors
p.s. I'm sorry I didn't have your websites bookmarked, dirtbag

1 comment:

  1. Sometimes he really does remind me of a toddler throwing a temper tantrum. As he's stomping his feet he says, "Fine! Then I'm removing my business from your site!"
    It seems like irrational thinking like that DOES lead to out-dated business models, which equals failure.

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