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I’m loath to second guess Rupert Murdoch.

It’s easy to dismiss his recent strop over Google and YouTube as the ramblings of a 78-year-old media mogul woefully out of touch with the digital age.

But this is a man worth billions, one who successfully monetised pay per view football when many doubted it would work and, despite the apparent failure of his $580 MySpace acquisition, he must have a genius long term strategy.

Surely?

He says he is in favour of the micro payments route – online pence removed from your digital purse for reading articles from The Times, The Sun, The News of the World and hundreds of other titles in his empire.

But micro-payments is the model publishers should have introduced 10 years ago, before they gave away all their content for free and began price wars and DVD cover offers which further eroded our loyalty to one print newspaper yet ensured that we had a copy of Where Eagles Dare to stick on while we sleep off our Sunday roast.

Although the music industry was slow and litigious in its response to online file sharing, there are now pay models, such as iTunes, which work to a degree. There will always be piracy.

And that is what Murdoch claims he is dealing with….

Piracy – outright theft of News Corp content.

Except Google isn’t stealing his content, it is aggregating it, sharing it. To read the NOTW’s latest revelation that there is an X Factor crisis I still have to land on a News Corp site, where the publisher can then ask for my payment.

So did we just ‘steal’ that content or direct you to it?

Murdoch may as well ask WH Smith to tell customers not to glance at a print edition of The Sun if they aren’t going to buy it. Google, like the newsagents’ shelf, is the shop window for his product.

Bloggers and Twitter users are potential street sellers, shouting out headlines to an online audience.

Yet Murdoch is still talking about removing News Corp titles from Google AFTER any pay walls are in place.

There seems to be absolutely no logic to that.

Unless being anti-Google as well as anti-BBC is Murdoch having fun and generating global PR to further his long term aim of using new best mate David Cameron (if elected) to slash BBC budgets and push for fresh online regulation to protect his content.

Because for micro-payments to really work, all Murdoch’s rivals need to follow suit, and his online ‘competition’ is hard to define and counteract with new legislation. Google is the key. If he can force it to the table to account for unproven crimes then he can get the biggest online player in a defensive position over regulation.

For instance, Murdoch openly hates the BBC for its ability to launch new digital ventures such as iPlayer and give away its content without the commercial pressures faced by publishers who rely on advertising.

But remove the BBC from the equation and you still have millions of online consumers who will happily take similar free news and gossip to that found in a News Corp title from any number of other sites or blogs. Even proposed ‘paid for’ content from a columnist such as Jeremy Clarkson or a chequebook exclusive will hit someone’s blog soon enough.

And Murdoch knows this. He needs to create a villain in the all powerful Google because the BBC, whatever faults it may have, is still much loved in the UK – kicking it too hard is like repeatedly punching Bruce Forsyth in the face.

David Cameron should be nervous. Murdoch’s sharks are tearing their last pounds of flesh from Gordon Brown and heading his way.

They’ll expect to be fed.

Tags: David Cameron, Google, Gordon Brown, micro payments, News of the World, Rupert Murdoch, Youtube

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Media, PR, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.