Murdoch's Paywall Bandwagon Has No Recruits

Rupert Murdoch has been on the warpath against Google for supposedly stealing his content for so long that he's become like Chicken Little: It's hard to take him seriously any longer.

Nevertheless, the media mogul just keeps prattling on.

"We are going to stop people like Google or Microsoft or whoever from taking stories for nothing, Murdoch said this week. "There is a law of copyright and they recognize it."

Murdoch is referring to the practice by Google News as well as the Google and Bing search engines to publish headlines and snippets of articles from News Corp. publications without paying for that right.

The search giants point out that by grabbing the snippets, they drive the majority of the traffic that Murdoch's web properties get, but he'll have none of that.

He calls their model "a "river of gold" and alleges: "They take [news content] for nothing. They have got this very clever business model."

Murdoch has been vowing to move his major British news properties behind a paywall like that around the Wall Street Journal. Of course, that is a very leaky paywall; all you need to do is copy a WSJ headline, enter it in a search field, and you'll import a free copy of those WSJ pieces.

Murdoch is already allowing that he won't charge much for online content, which sounds like back-peddling; plus he isn't going to institute these paywalls for another three months or so.

I've long felt that Murdoch has been waging this battle publicly mainly in the hope of driving a lucrative licensing deal with Google and Microsoft, but that also seems like a long shot now. Meanwhile, very few major news sites seem poised to sign up for the paywall bandwagon.

Here's a prediction: Murdoch will indeed institute a half-hearted paywall, it will fail, and he'll retreat. Then, he'll take up a new tack in his battle with the Internet as we know it.

In the end, despite his wealth and power, Murdoch's paywall threats will be nothing more than a minor footnote in the history of paid content online. This is largely because the next stage of the battle over content will be fought over the mobile web, not over the stationary computer platform that publishers have never been able to monetize.

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"You’ve got to hand it to Rupert Murdoch. The Australian-born, British and U.S.-based media mogul’s empire is now so vast that he can squeeze a quarter-billion-dollar’s worth of profits out of any random quarter..."

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