In financial circles when the Fed sneezes, the World markets catch a cold. Perhaps in the media, when Rupert Murdoch makes a move, others should clench their buttocks.

You can love him or loathe him, yet nobody would dispute that Murdoch is a media genius and in over 4 decades he has proven himself as a man with a Midas touch and an unsurpassed intuition in understanding content, distribution and audiences at every generational zeitgeist.

This is a man who launched satellite broadcasting whilst complacent executives at terrestrial TV channels chuckled – what does a down-market press baron know about TV?  Yet within a few short years Murdoch had redefined the delivery of sport, entertainment, news and movies to a modern audience.

This is a man who blindsided everyone by opening Wapping as a supposed new printing plant for a new London newspaper, but instead equipped it with the latest digital technology and moved all his newspapers to this new site – gaining economic advantage over his slower competitors (also enabling him to grab market share in a price war) and laying off a vast army of unionized print workers. There are many more stories….

So, why is Murdoch buying Dow Jones? Murdoch knows the B2C market, why is he moving into B2B? A number of analysts are busily asking can News Corp buy Dow Jones for $60 a share and make it pay off? They pull out their calculators and use a valuation of 10.8x 2007 EBITDA and get a value for Dow Jones’ core businesses of $4 billion. News Corp, though, is offering $5.5 billion. Therefore where is the missing $1.5 billion of value to be found?

News Corp are soon too launch Fox Business News as a cable, satellite, mobile and web service and based on industry average calculations on ad revenue per subscriber and other factors, analysts value the channel at $500 million. This is where Dow Jones content comes into play – whilst most analysts focus on Dow Jones print interests, many have failed to appreciate their online assets and B2B workflow tools like Factiva, despite having access to them on their intranet via corporate subscriptions.

Factiva provides essential business news and information together with the content delivery tools and services that enable professional workers to make better decisions faster. Factiva’s has licence agreements with more than 10,000 trusted and authoritative newspapers, magazines and newswires and includes the exclusive combination of The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Dow Jones and Reuters newswires and the Associated Press, as well as D&B company profiles.

Could Murdoch use Factiva to attack Google?   In looking at the relative size of web aggregators, the order is Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask with Factiva at seventh.

^{However, Factiva has licences with all the publishers to redistribute their content, and pays them a small royalty.   Google does not have a distribution licence and instead gives the publisher a tiny percentage of ad revenue. Murdoch knows that the Google search results are becoming increasingly irrelevant to a professional audience, he also knows via his experience with MySpace that a fashionable B2C web service quickly becomes unfashionable, whereas a professional audience operates 24/7, has money, is stable and needs good content and information.}

So perhaps Factiva should offer publishers more than Google gives them with their share of ad revenue on condition they reset their robot exclusions to limit the extent of the crawl of the Google spider on their sites? This would seriously diminish the quality of the Google index and enhance the quality of the Factiva aggregated content – this would encourage additional subscriptions to Factiva and drive advertisers away from Google. Particularly if a press campaign is started that highlights how Google is the Worlds' biggest pornographer, given the quantity of porn on the Google index and the advertising revenues Google derives from the porn industry. 

And with Factiva pumped out via the new Fox Business News across cable, web and mobile and throughout all the News Corp distribution channels– perhaps Rupert Murdoch will once again prove what a wily old fox he is.  The race is on.....