In an interview with FOX Business Network’s [FBN] David Asman, News Corporation Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch discusses paid content, business potential in the Middle East and the threat Iran poses to development in the Middle East.
Excerpts from the interview below: Courtesy of Fox Business Network
On how online advertising doesn’t cover revenue lost from online content:
“When somebody searches for something and a page comes up from your newspaper, it’s registered as a unique visitor and you sell your own advertising alongside that but that is nothing like enough, that’s peanuts compared to the costs of producing a real quality newspaper. And we just think, it’s not a question of old media vs. new media or anything like that, we’re a new media company in many many ways. Look at Avatar, that’s new media…that was a game changer.”
On paid content:
“Well Fox is now paid for. People when they pay their cable bills some of it comes to Fox. Cable television is paid television. But search on the Internet whether it be Bing or Google, whatever, it’s free and they simply take all our expensive and we think very good content such as Wall Street Journal or whatever and what they call they scrape it and they use it for search, it gives them their raw material for nothing and then they have this very clever business model of charging for searching it, we don’t get any of that. And they are technologically brilliant, they are a long way ahead but they do not have the right to do it if we want to stop them.”
On the advertising model for newspapers:
“I don’t think it’s dead, not at all…people are still going to want, they’ve got to establish and promote their brands. Brands are where the money is and you can’t really promote a brand on the internet or search.
On the FOX brand being stronger than ever:
“Oh yes, certainly thanks to the news channel. People love it and a cable channel could never dare throw it off.”
On the iPad and tablet technology:
“Now that Apple is coming out with the Ipad that will be a very interesting way, more media is going to go into the Ipad … And they’ll get better and better and you’ll be able to do more tricks with it…And particularly with advertising and you see an advisement and you touch it and it becomes a 30 second commercial it’ll be these sort of things will happen not this year perhaps.”
On making a profit in the Middle East:
“Well the channels that we are moving here are already profitable, so there’s been no change really there and the costs will not increase, if anything they will come down a little. So we’re, but we think this is a very good center and a home for this. There are 350 million people in the Middle East, if we get peace in the Middle East and I mean Iran and they live together, you’re going to see huge advances in living standards and of course a spread of money and GDP. It will certainly be possible to run profitable businesses here.”
On opportunities in Abu Dhabi and the Middle East:
“Well, it’s very central, they have great facilities here, they’re prepared to build a lot more and we’re going to send some of our channels here which we put all over the globe but particularly over Asia. So where we’ve been doing that in Hong Kong, we’re going to move about 10 channels here. And we uplink them from the satellites from here.”
On the potential for Abu Dhabi to be the bridge between the East and West:
“Yes, I mean the people themselves, the leaders that you meet from the Crown Prince down are very intelligent, Western educated people. And they appreciate the Western values and understanding them a lot. But you know, they equally, let’s be honest about it, they are very very very worried about Iran. They absolutely and they are very pro Western, they are very pro the investment the privately at least.”
On Abu Dhabi being open to new development and creative content:
“Only to a limited extent, I think that you have got to understand, there’s only probably 100,000 people really who are natives of Abu Dhabi. Qatar is about the same or 120,000 and yet in this area there’s now one and a half million Indians living. If you look around who’s running this hotel behind us, who’s behind the counter and they don’t own it but it’s going to come with one and a half million Indians in this area generally, doing most of the work, some Chinese too. They’re hard working, they’re entrepreneurial, and they’ll start their own businesses. You know, their airline here, they’ve got this huge airline Emirates. It’s one of the only airlines in the world that makes money but it’s got 68 flights a week to different Indian cities and its extraordinary the development here in that way.”
On how to see peace in Iran:
“I don’t know. A change of regime there, a revolution, the people are very unhappy but on the other hand you have a regime which is very tough and would not mind shooting tens of thousands of their own citizens to stay in power so I don’t see a change there.”
On the possibility of Israel engaging Iran:
“Well, you’ve got to find them first, they’re buried along way and they’re in different places and I’ll think you’ll find, I bet you the Israelis know where every pieces of it is but some of it’s in big cities so you’d be killing a lot of people. They don’t want to do it, their army, their navy, their air force, the Moussad do not want to do it unless at the last minute they see them, and the Iranians have the bomb. They want to work to see political change, wait for miracles because they don’t know the consequences of what it will be, nobody knows the consequences. What would happen to the price of oil, what would happen to the whole world economy?”
On the key to staying young:
Just stay curious and stay interested, try to live reasonably well.
