Mark Cuban Sees Google as a Vampire, Which Would Be True If ...

(MoneyWatch)  Take this with a grain of salt because, as a billionaire, he can pretty much say whatever he damn well pleases, but Mark Cuban, surprisingly enough, is beginning to sound an awful lot like Rupert Murdoch. Like the News Corp. chief, the HDNet CEO thinks that newspapers should break the Google habit. He pissed all over the conventional wisdom that more traffic = more revenue in a speech yesterday at the OnMedia conference in New York. Cuban told attendees: "Google is a vampire, and you run scared. There is no reason to be indexed in Google." (Apparently, the speech was chock full of vampire references, as though Cuban had been spending too much time reading the "Twilight" books or something.)

So, is he right?

Well, he would have more of a point if the following were true: that people who come to print Web sites unaided were considered more valuable to advertisers than ones who come through Google. In other words, if they were more monetizable, to be or not to be on Google wouldn't be as much of an issue. As powerful a traffic driver as it is, Google is almost entirely a vehicle that dispenses passers-by to sites. At the risk of indulging in a hopeless mix of metaphors, it doesn't really build much at all over the long-term for aggregatees. All it provides for most sites on a daily basis is a stream of raw visits, though those visiting have no more affinity for what they're visiting than they do for the water that comes out of their tap. Result:Most don't come back. The people who really value a site's content are those who bookmark the site or visit frequently to see its content. It stands to reason that those people are more valuable to advertisers than the passers-by. They already have an affinity for the content; that they might have more affinity for the site's advertising is obvious.

So, as long as advertisers don't differentiate between these two kinds of visitors, Cuban will be wrong. While most targeting rewards certain demos and behaviors, it doesn't do all that much when it comes to realizing that loyal site visitors have more value than those who aren't very loyal. It would be great if this would change; imagine, for instance, if, once The New York Times starts charging, it could also charge advertisers more for pages accessed by paid subscribers. Unfortunately, it probably won't happen. Looks like it will be a long time before the newspaper industry can divorce itself from statistics like the following, which made the rounds back when Murdoch was trying to rattle Google's cage last November : that, per Experian Hitwise, Google and Google News make up 25 percent of traffic to WSJ.com. As long as all visitors are treated more or less equal, nothing much is going to change.

Previous coverage of Google and the newspaper business at BNET Media:

• How Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Support Five Big Newspapers
• Google News Aggregation Is All Almost Half of Us Need
• Hey German Publishers, Google Helps Your Traffic! Really!