Rupert Murdoch is, any personal opinions aside, a pretty powerfull man in the news, book, movie and tv business. His company News Corporation owns amongst other companies:

- The Times
- The Sun
- The Wall Street Journal
- HarperCollins
- Fox (anything in tv and movies with the Fox name in it really…)
- ITV
- Sky
- and a hell of a lot of other stuff in mobile, advertising, internet and the list keeps going!

On the other hand we have Microsoft, that are trying to find a way to pave a newly built road. In essence they want us to start using their search engine Bing instead of Google.

Microsofts plan is to have Mr. Murdoch move all his newspaper search engine traffic from Google to Bing, and in return be compensated for it… well get money! Because the way it works now, the newpaper business make only minor web ad amounts from search engine hits.

“The [New York] Times typically gets about twice the traffic the WSJ does. For simplicity’s sake (I don’t know if the WSJ gets more or less per unit of traffic than the NYT does), let’s say the Journal will get half what the Times will in online ad revenue this year, or $51 million. If all visitors were equal (and they’re not!), that would imply Google brings just $11.7 million a year in ads or $978,000 a month.”

But if Murdoch does decide to move his traffic from Google to Bing, it will more than force Google to also start spending, it will send some much needed cash to a newspaper industry that is still struggeling to make money online. The question is if it’s the right way…

If Newc Corporation decides to exclusively let Bing handle their newspapers search engine business then…
 
- How aggressively would they try to prevent it spreading in other forms over the web? aka do they really think they can control the web.
- What would Google do? Would they cry fair use?
- Would it even be worth their while seeing that a lot less people use Bing? Or are they arrogant enough to think that people would just blindly follow their newpaper online where ever it moves?

This could end up as a gigantic mess that would (maybe) ultimately change a lot of things….

Streetbeat