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Jason Calacanis, prominent web entrepreneur, lays out an interesting theory concerning Rupert Murdoch’s plan for a new paid-content model with his newspaper properties.

At it’s core it involves modifying site meta properties and instructing Google’s automated crawlers to skip over the WSJ, Fox News, etc.  I don’t fully agree with Jason’s analysis.  By blocking robots and Google search access to your content you shed massive amounts of pageviews.  What you gain in subscription revenue will be massively outweighed by a loss in mind share.  Out of sight, out of mind for the droves who currently visit the WSJ and other outlets, largely driven there by standard search.

Ask the New York Times how well a paid subscription model worked out for them.  You have valuable content, you have a valuable reputation and position in the public mindset.  When you lock that away behind faux walls you drift down the hill.  Content wants to be free, accessible and searchable.  Monetize it with smarter, more targeted ads, not by fake boundaries and a walled garden.

Walls and restrictions around content are norms of the last century, not the current one.  This will only lead to failure.

Jason’s theory

Not sure if you read Rupert Murdoch’s comments today that Newscorp will probably block the Google search spider from indexing their news sites soon. Essentially this means that you would no longer see the Wall Street Journal in Google results. Sounds crazy huh? Suspend disbelief for a moment please because it’s actually genius and it’s actually worked already (in Korea!).

In fact, a couple of weeks ago we had this *exact* discussion on This Week in Startups. Essentially, I put forth a simple strategy for Microsoft to pursue with Bing in which they would go to content providers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal and offer them 50% more revenue then they are currently getting from Google search referrals to be exclusively indexed in Bing.

This is 100% legal and, in fact, Google encourages people who don’t like how they do business to opt out of the Google index (they can do that because they are so huge and because they don’t like to be evil).

So, for a moment, imagine a world where Bing could say in their TV commercials:

“Want to search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and 3,894 other newspapers and magazine?”

“Well, then don’t go to Google because they don’t have them!”

“Go to Bing, home of quality content you can trust!”