I’ve been following the story that’s appeared recently where Murdoch is saying that he will effectively use robots.txt to stop Google from crawling any of his paid content. Like many others, when I first read about it I thought that it was going to be a monumental failure and that he’d soon go back on the idea when the traffic levels started to drop off. Tim Burrowes from mUmBRELLA wondered the same thing and posted an analysis of the interview with Murdoch on Sky News. This story got picked up by a lot of the mainstream media sites in the USA and delivered a huge amount of traffic to the mUmBRELLA site (and why is it capitalised like that anyway?) and he’s had a look over the google analytics that have resulted from the massive spike in visitors. One big thing he’s determined is that the vast majority of the visitors to the site don’t come back. I too have noticed this on a much smaller scale. There are a few postings on this blog that have generated a lot more traffic than normal (hundreds of hits in a day, as opposed to the usual single figures) but these visitors don’t seem to be hanging around and reading much more. Murdoch seems to realise this too and these are the visitors that he believes he can do without anyway…

Shock! Why Murdoch may be more right than wrong about Google – mUmBRELLA.