I read news mostly through an rss reader.  The Wall Street Journal syndicates only short excerpts of their articles and if I click through I get a truncated version of the article follwed by a friendly invitation to subscribe to the journal in order to view the rest of the article.  It looks like this.

But its not hard to get the full text of the article.  I just use google and type in the title of the article.  The first link I get is a link to the full text, no subscription required.  I always explained this to myself using a simple market-segmentation idea.  WSJ will not give their content away to someone who is browsing their site directly because that person has revealed a high value for WSJ content.  Someone who is googling has revealed that they are looking for relevant content, without regard to source.  There is more competition for such a user so the price is lower.

But today I noticed that bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, does not get the same special treatment.  If I bing “At Chicken Plant, A Recession Battle,” the link provided leads to the same truncated article as my rss reader.  Since users have free entry across search platforms I can’t see any reason why bing-searchers (bingers?) would be systematically different than googlers in terms of the economics above.  Therefore I am giving up on my theory.  What are the alternatives?

  1. Google has a contract with WSJ?
  2. WSJ would like to shut out googlers too but finds it hard to shut off a service that users have come to expect. Knowing this, they are keeping bingers out from the outset.
  3. The game between content providers has multiple equilibria.  On the google platform they are playing the users’ preferred equilibrium.  On the bing platform they have coordinated on their preferred equilibrium.
  4. Google has figured out a secret back-door that bing hasn’t found and WSJ just hasn’t gotten around to closing.

Ok the ideas are gettng more and more lame.  I am stumped.

Incidentally, there was an article in the New York Times about DOJ investigations of Google, and a Google PR offensive:

“Competition is a click away,” Mr. Wagner says. It’s part of a stump speech he has given in Silicon Valley, New York and Washington for the last few months to reporters, legal scholars, Congressional staff members, industry groups and anybody else who might influence public opinion about Google.

“We are in an industry that is subject to disruption and we can’t take anything for granted,” he adds.

Rings a bell.