Maybe Murdoch has figured out the internet

There was a lot of commemt and bravado circulating yesterday over Rupert Murdoch's latest foray into the online world.

It is worth reading John Gapper's interpretation in the FT

Mr Murdoch appears to be willing to sacrifice a lot of traffic to the websites of papers such as the Wall Street Journal and The Times in return for a payment from Microsoft. In effect, he would be swapping his revenue stream from online advertising with a payment from Microsoft for drawing visitors to Bing.

adding

that suggests one of two things: either, as a lot of digital evangelists have suggested, he is getting old and does not “get” the internet, or he has looked at the figures and decided that Google traffic is not worth very much. Personally, I think the latter is more plausible.