News Corp's Stupid Gamble - Delisting From Google

Reports are surfacing that News Corporation is considering any offers for payment in exchange for de-listing it's newspapers and Fox news from Google News.  It is said that Microsoft is talking to News Corp about a deal where News Corp will make it's properties available through Microsoft's Bing search engine.  Bing's market share in search has fallen into the mid single digits after capturing 12 percent of all web searches when Microsoft launched Bing back in the summer.

For News Corp and other struggling news outlets the thought of the kind of money that Microsoft can bring to the table is at the very least worth considering, any such move to delist from Google may end up being hurtful in the end.  It's not just Google's web search market share of 80 percent or more that would make delisting from Google foolish to say the least.  People who use competing search engines often just use them as a second resort after searching Google first. 

A quick injection of cash from Microsoft may help News Corp in the short term, but in the long run sticking their online news properties on a search engine that is only capturing five percent of all web searches will rob them of the very thing that all online and offline media companies fight over, eyeballs.  Online advertising hasn't paid out the kind of money that media companies had expected, and people didn't pay to subscribe to online content.  Craig's List stole their classified cash cow, it's not hard to understand how traditional news outlets are struggling in the online age.