Murdoch’s plans for the web have been much speculated about, for good reason – there’s a whiff of Diller about Murdoch, in that sense that whatever he ends up doing will matter a lot. Fortune has a Q&A up outside their traditional pay wall with Ross Levinsohn, the point man behind Murdoch’s web push. The interview was done by Adam Lashinsky, who also penned a piece on Murdoch last week in Fortune, which he reminds me is outside the pay wall as well. In it, he describes Murdoch’s Internet retreat last month, which I, among others, was invited to and presented at. From it:
“When you’ve got a big, expanding world economy, you’d expect a boom in advertising, and it hasn’t been there,” [Murdoch] explains a couple of weeks later in his Los Angeles office, a spacious fifth-floor redoubt overlooking the sprawling lot of his 20th Century Fox movie studio. Even as traditional ad sales failed to boom, he says, small in-house websites like Foxnews.com and Britain’s Times Online started generating meaningful revenue on puny investments. “You start putting two and two together, and we decided to abandon our defenses and get offensive.”
In 2006 the big internet story will be written by Murdoch and how he presents his empire to us through the web. He has the scale and he is buying the tools to make the presentation.