The Horse Versus The Automobile

Earlier this year Rupert Murdoch said his News International empire would start charging for online content. Amongst cries of derision from various press “experts”, the old goat was vague about how, exactly, he’d get people to pay for stories that were free everywhere else. Whatever you say about Murdoch (politics aside), he’s a savvy businessman, but this new step seemed, quite frankly, like a real money loser.

Well, it seems I’m not alone in this assumption. The Guardian reported that Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, whilst speaking in London recently, attacked Murdoch’s idea as painfully antiquated. He wasn’t the only one at the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts event to share his view. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn also located some stones to sling at Murdoch, contending that “I am sure that during the transition from horses to automobiles there were some people bemoaning the loss of horse transport.”

Murdoch is upset that Google has, as he sees it, stolen content from many of his publications, and he wants the big search engines to pay up, creating something called a “paywall”. It seems Stone has a much more progressive attitude, suggesting that Murdoch would make much more money by finding interesting ways to capitalize on freeing up his content, rather than protecting it. As Twitter is partnered with LinkedIn, Myspace, AOL, and, of course Google, his defensiveness must also be put in context.

Whatever the case may be, and whoever ends up making more money from their ideas, it seems it’s ultimately a question of being able, or not, to stem the tide of the public use of technology- and the proliferation of information. On this front, I think Twitter has got it won. But, even though Stone and Co. are clever young upstarts, and were valued at more than $1bn, they have yet to turn a profit. And that, is something Murdoch knows a thing or two about.