Regardless of what you may think about Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt, the guy has spunk.
He has decided to take on News Corp.'s (NYSE:NWS) Rupert Murdoch by arguing in favor of news aggregator sites -- and he's doing it through Murdoch's own The Wall Street Journal.
In an op-ed column this morning, Schmidt paints a rosy future for news sources that play along with the inevitable tech-savvy future. Targeted advertisements will get better. The public will warm to subscription models. Browsing through news online will get quicker and more customized. However, he refuses to let Google be the one in the crosshairs right now.
"With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame," he writes. "Much of their anger is currently directed at Google."
He goes on to suck out the venom, pointing out how Google sends a billion clicks a month to online news publishers through Google News and another 3 billion visits from other services. "That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free," he writes.
In other words, don't blame Google if you can't transform those leads into revenue-generating ad views or actual subscriptions.
Murdoch knows this, but he's still tinkering with the possibility of pulling his newspapers from Google listings, perhaps brokering a licensing deal through Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Bing, exclusively. The popularity of subscription-based offerings for Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle may help legitimize premium digital news, but can News Corp. really ignore Google's audience?
It's funny. Advertisers pay Google good money for leads, and Murdoch doesn't want them for free.
Who do you think is right in the battle between Google and News Corp.? Share your fighting colors in the comment box below.
