This week Mark Cuban spoke at the On Media conference here in New York. The interview can be viewed here, and he speaks about a lot of his business ventures. His comments regarding Google and news outlets have generated a buzz on various sites. Cuban's stance is that news/media outlets with established brands are killing themselves by being indexed in Google News. On his blog, Cuban writes "The branding message to the consumer is “I dont need to go to the newspaper homepage. Everything the newspaper has is referenced here in Google News." He goes on to say that news and media outlets are helping to build Google news' brand at the expense of their own brand. One thing that he hinted to was the fact that Google may someday be in the content creation business. "Why couldn’t they hire reporters ? Why couldn’t they give their content priority over all others ? More importantly, why wouldn’t they ?"
Cuban's solution to this problem is for News outlets to block google from their content, and start charging consumers. Really? The NY Times proposed paid content model was specifically designed not to block search engines from their content. As far as I know, news and media outlets are living off of the traffic that they are getting from search engines. Rupert Murdock has taken a stance against news aggregators and blocked them from the content of his news and media outlet. Can this work? Maybe some of the most well know brands in the news industry can cut themselves off from all of this traffic, and additional ad revenue, but what about the medium and small brands? The small town newspaper. This is a big question right now in the industry, and I think most are waiting to see what will work. What's interesting to me is that more people seem to be taking the stance against search engines. Let's see if it works because there always seems to be someone willing to give content up for free in exchange for the traffic.
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