23
2009
News Corp. – If You de-Index Will They Still Come?
Two weeks ago we posted on Rupert Murdoch’s threat to block Google from Indexing News Corp. content. While at first it seemed as though Murdoch was merely posturing with hypotheticals, reports continue to indicate that News Corp. is seriously considering choosing Bing as the exclusive “indexer” of their news content.
While our data hasn’t changed substantially since the last post on this topic, given continuing talks I think we should dig a little deeper into our search data. For brevity’s sake, I’ll restrict this analysis to U.S. traffic to WSJ.com and leave the analysis of other News Corp. properties and markets for another post.
As of last week, WSJ.com’s referred and non-referred traffic from Google and Google News amounted to 15.3% and 11.0% respectively. Analyzing Google search terms driving traffic to the Journal, the top 100 terms accounted for over 21.6% of all Google search traffic to WSJ.com. Of that 21.6%, 13.4% were navigational or brand searches (e.g. “Wall Street Journal,” “WSJ,” “WSJ.com” etc…). Even if Murdoch decides to block Google, these navigational search queries will most likely remain intact.
Of the remaining 8.2%, the majority of searches were for stock quotes, and general business related searches. Most specific news related searches fill-out the long tail of search queries. While the Journal may lose traffic if it ceases to cooperate with Google the loss may be less then anticipated.
The potential loss of Google News traffic is potentially more serious. As reported here, over the three years, WSJ.com’s traffic from Google News has grown from 2% to over 11%. As we see in the table below, the Journal is receiving more than double the traffic from Google News than newspaper sites overall (a custom category including national and regional papers). Bing, a potential News Corp. suitor for search exclusivity provides less than half of Google News’ volume as of last week.
As newspapers continue to search for a way out of the search rip current, its hard not to root for Murdoch’s maverick de-index strategy, that being said, the numbers bring us back to reality. As print continues to hemorrhage readership, could blocking your most significant traffic source be a wise choice?
I don’t think you can adequately say any of this without sharing what the traffic is doing once it hits news corp sites. Traffic doesn’t always mean audience. Lots of search traffic bounces in under less than a minute and doesn’t come back — without session times, repeat visitors, etc. you can’t qualify that traffic being driven anywhere actually constitutes value. Audience and traffic are two very different things in the internet world. Lots of sites are finding out the very hard way that just because they get a lot of traffic coming in, it doesn’t mean its viable.
Microsoft-News Corp. Talks: A Marriage Made in Hell?
Two weeks ago, I commented on Rupert Murdoch's threat that News Corp. was thinking of blocking Google
You’re right, patricia, but if we’re going to step far enough back to include what the traffic does on the site, we might as well step far enough back to consider the loss of mindshare among the casual visitors from Google News. It -is- a good thing for people to click through from Google News, because that results in more (free) placements of “Wall Street Journal” links on the Google News aggregator pages as high-quality sources.