A Look At Rupert Murdoch's History Of Internet Failures
from the what-do-they-have-in-common dept
Ross Pruden points us to a neat little graphic that Mediaweek put together, highlighting all of News Corps.' internet failures over the years (pdf) as it gets ready to launch its iPad only publication called The Daily. If you look at the image (or click it to go to the original Mediaweek pdf), you begin to sense a pattern:
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Filed Under: broadcast, community, content, internet, rupert murdoch
Companies: news corp.
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Re: Oooooh Fail
I'd rather be a comfortable, self-aware person of moderate income than a clueless wealthy ass-hat.
Jes' saying.
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Re: Oooooh Fail
I'd rather be a comfortable, self-aware person of moderate income than a clueless wealthy ass-hat.
Jes' saying.
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You would love to fail like him, huh? Will you still feel that way in 20 years when his empire has crumbled around him and his failures have bankrupted his family? Would you love to be remembered as a dinosaur of a previous age who utterly failed to respond to the world changing around him? Would you love to be the 'riches to rags' failure story of the 21st century?
All of these things will happen, and Rupert Murdoch will be viewed as a total, complete failure. History will not be kind to him, not would it be to you, if you were worth remembering.
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to have a history that your family will be embarrassed of is no way to go through life.
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Mark Zuckerberg is at least as rich, and he did it before hitting the age of thirty. If your going to measure the size of a man's wallet at least have the decency realize who's on the way up, and who's on the slow, steady decline down.
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The way up, the way down... Old Rupe will die with enough money to buy everyone here and turn them into slaves. Calling him a failure makes me want to fail like him.
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The way up, the way down... Old Rupe will die with enough money to buy everyone here and turn them into slaves. Calling him a failure makes me want to fail like him.
He might die like Robert Maxwell...
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You could have said that about Hitler in 1943.
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the unique part about the ones on techdirt is that they tend to make sense and only get used when the person they're responding to is being an idiot.
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Re: ...and he is still a million times richer than you will ever be.
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On the flip side of the coin though, I take solace in knowing that my heart isn't a black tar-ball devoid of a soul.
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blah blah blah
Mr. Murdoch kicked a lot of people's asses in business to get where he is today and there is a real story there. Unfortunately for him the world that he thrived in went digital, unless something drastically, I don't think news corp will ever reach the level of readership and influence it had previously enjoyed.
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charity?
It bothers me the way people handed over their hard work for a bit of money, not only that, but money that is collapsing on a daily bases.
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Somebody remind me....
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Running a biased news organization you can not allow community. Community is about communication, his news organization is about spoon feeding information and not allowing any discenting voices to prove the opinions expressed as fact as wrong.
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Aren't all news organizations like this?
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Yes they are, and they just don't get the community piece. Which is why the 14-28 year olds are all getting their news from face book, news reader, and the like and ignoring newspapers and old school news.
In two years the 14-28 year old crowd will be the 14-32 crowd, the age range is expanding faster than people age, and it is accelerating. So unless the old school news organizations adapt they will fail in the next 10 years.
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Whats really neat is the fact that the content industries (record labels, studios, newspapers, etc) state that the 14-28 years old crowd don't buy their stuff any more. The true story is that it is a set of curves where the majority in the 14-28 yr olds don't. Techdirt had a great chart showing the trend for cellphones.
Personally I have bought 4 newspapers in the past 5 years. I used them as drop cloths when painting. The only part I read were the comics ...
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Murdoch can't blow through his money fast enough.
Dear Rupert (and all the sons), if you're *really* interested in just throwing your money away, I've about 10,000 ideas (costing $100 million each) which is sure to please and boost those magazine and newspaper circulars (outdated in the 80s...1880s).
:)
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Dow Jones?
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Re: Dow Jones?
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Countless failure? Or multi-step success?
This is the right lens to look at failure�a lesson from which we can make a critical course correction. Obviously, new business ventures must always mitigate failure, but if it happens, a thorough post mortem is often more informative than an outrageous success story. The difference between Murdoch and the people behind Yipit is a low cost investment to determine if the idea will be a success or a failure. Murdoch lays a lot on the line before the venture is adequately judged in the marketplace. Yipit knew in three days if their business was viable with users. Murdoch has had the luxury to spend millions of dollars before he can determine failure, but few people have such a luxury.
Having said that, there does seem to be a significant pattern to the kind of failures of Murdoch's endeavors, and Mike has pinpointed it. This is no longer a Read-Only world as Murdoch would like it to be, but a Read-Write world. Why did the powerhouse Myspace social network suddenly wither while newcomer Facebook explode?
Let's look more closely at Myspace vs. Facebook. Myspace had ads galore. Myspace had horrendous programming glitches. Myspace was slow. Myspace let users add so much junk (big images, sound files, horrible page and text coloring) to their personal pages that it often became a illegible mish-mash.
Facebook, though it has repeatedly invoked the wrath of its users for revamping its overall design too quickly, the end result is a cleaner and more stable platform. Ads are fewer and less egregious, but also more customized to the user�I have many times clicked on Facebook's ads because they offer something of interest to me; I never clicked once on any ostentatious Myspace ads.
My decision to jump from Myspace to Facebook was not taken lightly: I had invested time in acquiring over 300 "friends" so I had no desire to see all that time as a sunk cost. But the Myspace platform had been offering less value to me as a user... and the Facebook platform has only been offering more value to me as a user. Myspace was trending downward, Facebook upward.
So there is indeed a pattern to Murdoch's failure, as Mike suggests. Murdoch, a fine representative of the broadcast-only Old Guard, should swallow the pill and hand the reins over to his daughter who seems to have a more adaptive understanding of how social networks have introduced an irreversible interactive element to all media. Murdoch has had success from his previous ventures, but if he continues to ignore what the users now value (i.e., interactivity, quality web coding, targeted ads, sharabiility), we will continue to see his business ventures be outfoxed by faster and more insightful competitors like Mark Zuckerberg.
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Re: Countless failure? Or multi-step success?
Couple huge problems ...
Bureaucracy at a corporation like news corp is very slow to change and will fight tooth and nail to prevent it.
Web based organizations are highly efficient, news corp isn't, translating to the web would require the loss of 90% of the staff. A perfect example is Craiglist where less than 100 people handle the classified for an entire nation, where 10,000 (no citiation just a vague memory of the #) people used to be employed doing the same job.
Generic papers and news organizations are being replaced by person specific and targeted news. News that interests the individual without all the crap that doesn't interest them. I have 400 RSS feeds I follow all on very specific topics.
All in all it doesn't bode well for NewCorp. Its a long term short in my book.
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Re: Re: Countless failure? Or multi-step success?
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Makes sense now
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And then from suck to blow.
Never been back to use the sites since then though so oh well.
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Rupert Murdoch Is A Brilliant Guy
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Murdoch
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Re: Murdoch
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1)Social interaction between people, groups and businesses
2)A segment that you visit on purpose when you want to buy, be sold to or be 'pushed' by vendors and people who want to thrust stuff on you
3)A segment which we can't yet classify because it hasn't emerged/been invented yet!
Murdoch and his ilk will play and be profitable in segment2!
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Murdoch and Internet
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