Rupert isn’t dumb but will need his smartest people around him now. His ability to make a turn around with News lies in truly understanding his audience and making an offer they consider to be unique and differentiating.

It’s as simple and difficult as that!

Saying the opposite simply signals the paucity of your ad serving/repping. The problem you have is that your ad delivery package is not targeting ads to your visitor’s profile/interests. Consider signing up Google Adsense for an effective TARGETED ad serving solution. Lol.

Today I dug up my IM history to re-read the story. Then I saw this followup. That’s the beginning of a relationship.

I’m in Seattle, so I’m still probably not your target audience, and might even be considered a waste of bandwidth. But if I weren’t, or if you had a different audience, that original link might have been the start of a commercial relationship.

That’s what Rupert’s sites need to do: build a relationship with people who might not have otherwise known about your site. It doesn’t happen with the first click. It might happen with the 3rd, or the 10th, or the 100th.

I still think it will be a challenge and require some real differentiation and improvement on current offerings. But still, very interesting findings.

Mr Murdoch: When do people go online to read news and where? You need to engage the bosses. have you thought this through?

And Rupert’s publications will lose influence in proportion to the number of people who used to read them before the building of his mighty pay wall.

Meanwhile, it’s a farce that media members constantly point to the Wall Street Journal as one of the new supposedly successful web pay walls in existence. In truth, the publication has far less paid subscribers than they claim. I know people in nearby Houston (Texas) who were laid off from a particular financial services company four years ago. At the time, each employee there was given a WSJ online account (for which you can bet the company did not pay anything approaching “full price”). Today, all those people still can access their accounts.

No one is paying for them, and the WSJ knows that full well (or if they don’t, their accountants are idiots). Yet they don’t remove anyone from the roles, because it’s worth more to them to charge their advertisers based on fluffed up and fictional paid-subscriber numbers.

Finally, while I don’t know about his other holdings, Mr. Murdoch has seriously weakened the WSJ’s standing as a trusted source of business news. If you’re going to start charging for web content, I would think the proper formula would be to improve the content first, then charge for it. But he’s going at it the other way around.

Good luck with that.

That said, I agree that most Google-directed traffic to mainstream news sites probably doesn’t become loyal overnight either. But you don’t NEED most of it. You only need a little bit; it adds up.

fairfax too do the same thing – buying terms like ‘Big Day Out’ and ‘music festivals’ and driving traffic to The Vine – I guess “clearly transitory Google traffic” will do if you can’t organically generate “deeply engaged traffic”

the whole debate is getting so confusing. tim – it appears honourable that you acknowledge that this search driven audience isn’t great for your advertisers … I would hazard a guess no large website/publisher in AU really gives a toss about where their traffic comes from or how long they stay. A page view is a page view.

In this whole discussion the silence is deafening.