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WSJ.com Considers Blocking Google
Lots of talk today about Rupert Murdoch's suggestion that News Corp might start blocking Google from premium properties, like WSJ.com, in an effort to drive up subscription-based revenues.
Hitwise shows that Google and Google News account for 25% of WSJ.com's traffic. Bill Tancer, general manager for global research at Hitwise, also commented on the behavior of those visitors:
According to Experian Hitwise data, over 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are "new" users who haven't visited the domain in the last 30 days.
And concludes that it might be a mistake:
While Mr. Murdoch makes some strong points in his Sky News interview regarding the plight of the news industry and the perils of making all content free, as clickstream data demonstrates - blocking Google could isolate the Journal from potential new online subscribers.
He may well be correct. But I'm not sure we have enough evidence to be certain.
Like Mike Hudack, I think there is a counter argument here about there being much greater value (in terms of lifetime revenue) in the non-Google visitors. Anyway, it's nearly 2010. The decisions about content being free were made way back in the mid 2000's. It's healthy for the big content providers to experiment.
BTW, if anybody from News Corp is reading and would like help in figuring out what else distinguishes the Google visitors from the non-Google visitors, give me a shout, Crowd Science can help.
