Exclusive indexing deals on the horizon?

LSF — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:47:48 +0000

I just received an email from Jason Calacanis. I think his rants are brilliant and, despite being the master of self promotion, gets things about right about most times.

I didn’t receive the email personally, rather, I am on his distribution list for the “Jason List” which he created because he got pissed with people using his blog for SEO, to write pointless responses, etc. To subscribe go here: http://www.bit.ly/jasonslist

Today’s email is a spin on Rupert Murdoch’s series of decisions to protect his content:

1) put a pay-for-cotent mechanism in place i.e. you pay to access the content his company has spent money to create because the value of the content is pressumably higher than the various ads display upon the page generate amd;

2) stop allowing Google et al to index news pages because Google creates significant value for its self without paying for access to the content (I do believe Google pays Twitter for instand access to its content but Twitter has the benefit of its content only being valuable within a certain time range)

The crux of Jason’s arguement is that Murdoch missed a trick: he should have done an exclusive with one search engine, namely Bing, in order to capture value for himself and allow Bing to differntiate itself from the big G via its content. This throws up a few other missed opportunities for Bing:

Twitter – Sign an exclusive for indexing Twitter content as $100 million is chump change for Bing.

Digg – Microsoft has an exclusive on Digg advertising so why not block the Google crawlers.

Facebook – Microsoft owns a chunk of Facebook so use it to get exclusivity on indexing.

Delicious – As part of the Yahoo! deal grab Delicious data to augment search

Flicker – AGain as part of the Yahoo! deal, build the best image search engine with exclusive access to Flicker images.

Is this the future of part of the search wars? A lot of social services don’t need Google traffic to survive. Does Google need them more. It did with Twitter. Will search engines start to buy exclusive indexing rights and differentiate based on content access?

I just received an email from Jason Calacanis. I think his rants are brilliant and, despite being the master of self promotion, gets things about right about most times.

Today’s email is a spin on Rupert Murdoch’s series of decisions to protect his content:

1) Put a pay-for-cotent mechanism in place i.e. you pay to access the content his company has spent money to create because the value of the content is pressumably higher than the various ads displayed upon the page generate and;

2) Stop allowing Google et al to index news pages because Google creates significant value for its self without paying for access to the content (I do believe Google pays Twitter for instand access to its content but Twitter has the benefit of its content only being valuable within a certain time range)

The crux of Jason’s arguement is that Murdoch missed a trick: he should have created an exclusive deal with one search engine, namely Bing, in order to capture value for himself and allow Bing to differentiate itself from the big G via its content. This throws up a few other missed opportunities for Bing:

Twitter – Sign an exclusive for indexing Twitter content as $100 million is chump change for Bing.

Digg – Microsoft has an exclusive on Digg advertising so why not block the Google crawlers.

Facebook – Microsoft owns a chunk of Facebook so use it to get exclusivity on indexing.

Delicious – As part of the Yahoo! deal grab Delicious data to augment search

Flicker – Again as part of the Yahoo! deal build the best image search engine with exclusive access to Flicker images.

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Exclusive indexing deals on the horizon?