Twitter founder thinks Murdoch is daft
TWITTER CO-FOUNDER Biz Stone said he'd "love to see what happens" if Rupert Murdoch carries out his threats to block Google from his newspapers' websites.
Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp conglomerate owns the Times and Sun newspapers in the UK, the Wall Street Journal and New York Post newspapers along with the stridently right-wing Fox News TV network in the US, and other print and electronic media properties worldwide.
Murdoch has repeatedly railed that Google and others have been 'stealing' his new outlets' content, and he recently threatened to block them from scanning his newspapers' headlines to generate search results.
Speaking recently at an event sponsored by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) in London, Stone said that newspapers should become "radically open" if they want to make money online. He told the BBC, "The future is in openness, not closed."
Suggesting that he'd like to see Murdoch try to block search engines and erect paywalls around his newspapers' content, Stone said he thought that Murdoch should be allowed to "fail fast" if he does.
"They should be looking at this as an opportunity to try something radically different and find out a way to make a ton of money from being radically open rather than some money from being ridiculously closed," he said.
Twitter is a paragon of openness itself, and that has enabled the service to grow at an astronomical rate. From February 2008 to February 2009, the number of Twitter users grew from 475,000 to seven million, a growth rate of 1,382 per cent, according to Nielsen Online. Though Twitter's growth rate has fallen off a bit recently, Stone said it is "continuing to grow very fast from an international and a mobile perspective".
Amazingly enough, Rupert Murdoch doesn't understand the newspaper business. It has always been based on having a monopoly on news coverage in a particular area, never collected more from its subscribers than it spent on distribution, and has always relied on advertising to make money.
However with the rise of the Internet, geographically based news monopolies have more or less evaporated. What Murdoch doesn't quite realise is that a lot of people who are online don't really need what he's selling any longer, although if it's free and convenient they'll maybe check it out. If not, then the prime character of the Internet still holds true, in that it interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.
We'd like to see ol' Rupert try to buck that reality, frankly. If he doesn't own all of the world's media, and even the entire Internet itself - and we don't put that ambition past any manipulative, megalomaniacal pathocrat - then he'll lose.
All Twitter needs to do is relax its 140-character limit on users' "tweets", and it can crowd-source the news everywhere and thereby quickly overrun Rupert Murdoch's old media empire.
If he puts up paywalls on all of News Corp's news and information outlets, Murdoch will richly deserve to fail, and he will have nothing other than his own grasping greed to blame when his media empire goes down in flames. µ
L'Inq
BBC
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The more you have, the more you have to lose, hence tighter grips and more control.
But as life has taught so many, the more you fear losing something, the greater the chance is that you do.
Twitter is a joke. It is basicly useless beyond being a great place to be an egomaniac. Want to see something fail. Tell me how well twitter is doing 5 years from now... If a person wants to charge for content, they should. Let the free market rule. Supply and demand will triumph. Those who think stealing content and twittering it to everyone for free are going to lose.
If Mr. Magoo wants the shirt off my back, then he'll have to buy the shirt first. You can't get threads from a bare.
That old adage no longer applies.
The workaround is to simply pay someone to publish enough false stories that any true ones get lost or marginalized.
Providing that service is the business Murdoch is in (and getting free publicity for).
now, when this old fart will place the same restrictions on the access to fair and balanced Fox News we may see the day when significant percentage of US populations will start to think for them-self, again
Free market, blah blah, Supply and demand, blah blah blah. Same old mantra that the RIAA and MPAA have been trumpeting for years while trying to keep a stranglehold on a out-of-date and failed business model. Murdoch is no different and it seems neither are you Mr. Love. Your not a lawyer by any chance are you?
Whether or not Twitter, Youtube, Facebook etc fail or not is irrelevant. The fact that they, and the Internet, have changed the rules of commerce and reshaped business models is a fact that many corporations have been slow to realize. Some too slow.
Here's an axiom to add to supply and demand. LEAD, FOLLOW OR GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY
"Stridently right wing."
Get real. Fox is nowhere near as "stridently right wing" as the "to the left of the commies" rag you work for.
How about reporting the bloody news, instead of injecting all the political hate, anger and class envy crap into your mediocre articles.
I'll tell you a failed business model: one that makes no money. Twitter is one such example. It grows and grows, but it still makes no money aside from what venture capitalists throwing at it. It reminds me of the hokey businesses that were so "hot" during the tech bubble burst.
Twitter is like the opposite of newspapers. It's free, written by anyone, but as a result, is not meant to be free of factual errors, and contains mostly vacuous content written by people with nothing better to do.
Really, I hope the world chooses Murdoch over Twitter.
From a twit? Twitter is like toilet paper, the more you use it the smellier it gets.
which is why they interfere with politics to further their business agenda and have hired the Tories to get rid of Ofcom and BBC next year, for the small price of David Cameron's soul. But I digress.
They wont remove all traces from google will have link pages to feed in from google and keep the content off the record. Lots of people do it already.
The question is whether their special interest news is unique and reliable enough to pay for. The argument goes that everything is free on the wibble if you know where to look so why pay for it. As for reliability I am willing to bet it will only be dispassionate as far as news that does not related to News Corp, the moment anything does it will be nobbled and you wont know what the truth is any more. Thats the problem with anti-trust offenders in control of multi-outlet media empires. They end up controlling what you hear for their benefit. There ought to be a law against it!
He's getting the news for FREE right ? He's STEALING IT FROM the NEWS MAKERS and then selling it for a profit !
Making a living on others hard work. So if your name gets on the news Sue them for compensation.
If the Inq is such a "Commie Rag" why are you wasting your time reading it?
Or are you one of those sad people that enjoy getting worked up into a righteous lather and spouting off?
I think I've just answered my own question here...
It's *Nielsen* Online (Nielsen Netratings I think now), not Neilsen.
All I know is that I have not directly paid for news in a decade. Probably never will either.
I love the fact that all the Sky websites (owned by Murdoch) all have searches "powered" or "enhanced" by Google.
Hey necro, no offense but I think you need to brush up on your business models. The point is to turn a profit & none of those revolutionary new business models you cited have actually done so, let alone consistently quarter after quarter..
In fact they cost money, do you know how much youtube has cost google? You are confusing you getting stuff for free with companies making money.
This morning I heard on the radio that they may make an agreement so that MS pays News corp for their 'content' and shows up there. Good deal for both of them, not that it affects me anyway (as I don't use Bing nor read any of RM stuff).
SKY News, SKY Internet, SKY Telephone, SKY tv sports etc etc.
I think Murdoch is sitting on a massive opportunity. What he needs is someone to walk in the door with a plan on how to make serious money from it.
I have an idea of how to do it. I'm sure most of you do too. Murdoch just needs one of us to show him. ;-)
@TruthSquad
Get a clue the original article was from the far Left, politically correct, BBC; it is well known that the BBC don't much tolerate genuinely unbiased or right wing journalists; they have clearly already broken their charter, on impartiality, on several occasions!
As for Murdoch, he has his own agenda, hurting business model, and is biased, like much of the establishment media.
All of the establishment media are complicit in biased reporting and censorship, e.g. events which are quite inconvenient for political correctness, or big money, either don't get reported, or get 'edited' (spun)!
We have the Internet to route around the establishment BS; the Inq does its bit.