I’ve always been intrigued by Jeff Jarvis, ever since he single handily brought a firestorm down upon Dell and coined the term “Dell Hell” so seeing his keynote at Search Engine Strategies Chicago was at the top of my priority list.  I wasn’t disappointed this morning either, Jeff Jarvis hit some very relevant points with his presentation, especially when it came to this changing world of search, online marketing and “old media”.

I found his keynote very poignant, taking a look at how big media (newspapers) have really got it all wrong when it comes to Google.  Murdoch and some of the other media industry giants want to blame Google and paint Google as a monster, when in reality its their own lack of knowledge of how to operate in this new medium that is the actual boogie man in the closet for these media conglomerates.

I wrote about Murdoch’s idea to block out Google a few weeks ago, and I keep coming back to the same thoughts that Jeff Jarvis has.  Google’s not stealing content, Google is actually providing opportunities, it’s just that these old huge media companies don’t know how to properly and efficiently turn this opportunities to their favor, instead all they really want to do is blame someone and right now that easy target is Google.

Jarvis pointed out that the way the media outlets operate now is that they make people come to the news, they expect to dictate to the audience what is news and that they decide it.  That way of working is at an end.  People want the news that they want to find them.  This isn’t fairytale wishes either, with the internet this is going to be reality very soon.

Jeff Jarvis then questioned why haven’t these media companies gone the way of what YouTube has, by making everything embeddable?  By making things portable, you can reach more people and its easier for people to share what they think is important with their audiences.  There are some places experimenting with this already, The Guardian, Jarvis explained is one example.  The Guardian wants to be part of the fabric of the web and they are understanding that they need to come to you with their content.

At the end of the day, Google isn’t the enemy for newspapers.  As Eric Schmidt pointed out in his op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Google offers 100,000 opportunities to newspapers a minute to win loyal readers.  They do that for FREE.  It’s not Google’s fault that “blustery” CEO’s like Murdoch can’t figure out how to capitalize on these opportunities that are being dropped on their virtual doorsteps

Rupert Murdoch the CEO of News Corporation is really creating a bit of buzz in the Search Engine world.  Why?  Well it seems that Murdoch believes that his collection of news sites which include U.S.  media outlets such as FoxNews.com, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and international news outlets such as the Daily Telegraph in Australia, The Sun and The Times in the UK as well as channels such as National Geographic, would not suffer greatly if he blocked Google from accessing them and allowing Google to have them in their index and offering them up as relevant search results for searches done on the site.

So is he crazy?  Does he really realize the effect that taking such a drastic measure will have on his search traffic?  I would suppose they have some inkling since Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer was quoted by the Telegraph.co.uk as saying

“The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.”

I cannot claim to be an expert of News Corp’s properties or their properties’ demographics, but most people consume their news these days via hearing about it on a site, primarily social media sites, and then going to a search engine to find out more.  It’s happening more and more these days – look at how much Twitter and its trending topics affect how people search.

When people see things trending on Twitter, say for example like Kayne or Taylor Swift when Kayne so rudely interrupted Taylor’s acceptance speech for an award.  On Twitter you saw that both Kayne and Taylor Swift were trending terms shortly after the incident happend.  Without going to a search engine to figure out why they were trending, you’d have to guess through the tweets that were happening.  By going to the Google, at that time, searching for either one of their names produced a news one box with links to news articles that contained a lot more relevant information.

While Miller says the traffic received from Google is the least valuable, I wonder where they are looking to get more valuable traffic?  Other than relying on their return visitors through bookmarks or direct type ins, there’s not much more valuable traffic.

Social Media although it looks like it could be the answer to all their prayers, if you take a look closer, it’s likely even less valuable than Google’s traffic.  News media sites primarily focus on social news sites like Digg, Fark, Reddit or Ballhype.  If they are expecting better traffic they should really look at how members of these communities function.  Community members in these sites click on the story to see if they want to vote for it and immediately leave to go vote on more stories back on the social news sites.  This type of “hit and run” traffic is a lot less valuable if you are trying to get the visitor to stay on the site longer or view other  pages.

At least with search traffic coming from Google visitors stay on the site longer, especially if there’s photos or videos to interact with on the content, because they want to become educated on the topic they searched for.

All of this hull-a-baloo that Murdoch is making sounds more like someone who’s just pissed off with the popular kid they were playing with and wants to take his toys home so no one else can play unless they come with him and that hopes the rest of his “gang” will follow him back to his house.

If other news sites actually start analyzing their web analytics for their sites and really break down the search traffic, I have a feeling they are going to continue to “play” with Google because they will find the traffic from Google is actually quite valuable.  They also might find that while Social Media News Sites will drive traffic, if they segment that out and analyze that as well, they can see a difference in the quality via time on site and pages viewed.

So what say you?  Is Murdoch crazy for pulling his sites from Google or is he’s one of the smartest guys to try and start a “Google Revolt”?