In other news: business moguls continue to crowbar the interwebs into an older, paper based business model.

Team Jason,

Not sure if you read Rupert Murdoch's comments today that Newscorp
will probably block the Google search spider from indexing their news
sites soon. Essentially this means that you would no longer see the
Wall Street Journal in Google results. Sounds crazy huh? Suspend
disbelief for a moment please because it's actually genius and it's
actually worked already (in Korea!).

In fact, a couple of weeks ago we had this *exact* discussion on This
Week in Startups. Essentially, I put forth a simple strategy for
Microsoft to pursue with Bing in which they would go to content
providers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal and offer
them 50% more revenue then they are currently getting from Google
search referrals to be exclusively indexed in Bing.

This is 100% legal and, in fact, Google encourages people who don't
like how they do business to opt out of the Google index (they can do
that because they are so huge and because they don't like to be evil).

So, for a moment, imagine a world where Bing could say in their TV commercials:

"Want to search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and
3,894 other newspapers and magazine?"

"Well, then don't go to Google because they don't have them!"

"Go to Bing, home of quality content you can trust!"

Background Videos
===============

1. Video of me describing this strategy with Lon and Tyler two weeks
ago: http://bit.ly/2nOzNo
2. Video of Rupert's comments today: http://bit.ly/1gUBTD

Questions
===============
a) If 1,000 major publications pursued this strategy, would it work?
b) If you would only search the top 1,000 newspapers and magazines on
Bing, would you use it? How often?
c) What is the percentage chance this will happen (I need a #), and why?

all the best,

Jason

And it's not likely Murdoch will up the quality either

There’s quality to up? Lorks - I thought his papers were about tits and football.

No no, there's a TV guide too

But that’s only so I know when the tits and football are on the telly.