On the proverbial eve of the New York Times’ return to paywalldom (has everyone forgotten the Times already dropped its pay wall once because it didn’t work), a research firm posted a study showing 44 percent of Google News visitors scan headlines and don’t click through.

They think this is high. I’m shocked it’s so low.

Analyst Ken Doctor says: “Though Google is driving some traffic to newspapers, it’s also taking a significant share away. A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers’ individual sites.”

What is Google taking away? If I read all the newspaper and magazine headlines at the newsstand, am I taking something away? No. It’s the newspaper’s job to convince me to “buy” or, in this case, click. Google is providing a huge amount of free advertising for these newspapers and converting 56 percent of that traffic. Any marketer will tell you a 56 percent conversion rate is astronomically high. It is up to those newspapers to turn that traffic into loyal readers.

For Rupert Murdoch and others looking to block Google because it’s taking so much for itself, they are just going to leave that 56 percent for the thousands of other news sources willing share in free advertising. And if they really learn from this study, they’ll figure out how to write better headlines and better stories to convert the other 44 percent.

Rupert Murdoch, after a short time of seemed like he understood the internet was a new and exciting tool, has since changed his medication and now sees it as the evil of all evils. He has been pushing, vocally, not through action, reinstating paywalls on his various media properties. The Wall Street Journal is one of the last major newspapers to have a paywall around most of its content.

Now Murdoch is claiming he will block Google from indexing the WSJ and his other media properties. Murdoch told Sky News Australia “If they’re just search people… They don’t suddenly become loyal readers.” He explained that traffic from search engines involve no loyalty – just view a few headlines and leave.

Removing a site from Google takes just a few lines of code in a robot.txt file, something Google and other search engines make no attempt to hide. So why is Murdoch waiting?

Maybe because even without loyalty, Murdoch knows traffic will drop significantly without search engines bringing tons of free traffic. Even if 99 percent of those people never return, there are 1 percent that stay and might return. It’s up to Murdoch and his websites to give these users a reason to stay and then find ways to monetize that traffic. Murdoch has previously said no news websites or blogs are making serious money, ignoring the massive enterprises behind Gawker, Huffington Post, PerezHilton, TechCrunch and hundreds of others who have embraced the internet to find more cost-effective ways to engage audiences and produce compelling content.

Techdirt points out that for all Murdoch’s grandstanding, his own websites have aggregators that link to other people’s content the same way he claims others are stealing his content. When others aggregate content it’s stealing. When Murdoch does it, its convenient? Maybe this will stop his crusade to overturn fair use in the courts since he’d be culpable too.

This, I did not expect. I’ve been following the crisis of the newspaper industry closely and have many suggestions, which I’ve discussed here.  A new suggestion has come to my attention from a 1918 Atlantic Monthly article claiming the death of newspapers. As history shows, this was a little premature.

Oswald Villard found daily newspapers had rising costs and rarely, if ever, any profit.  He writes:

It is a fact, too, that there are few other fields of enterprise in which so many unprofitable enterprises are maintained. There is one penny daily in New York which has not paid a cent to its owners in twenty years; during that time its income has met its expenses only once. Another of our New York dailies loses between four and five hundred thousand dollars a year, if well-founded report is correct, but the deficit is cheerfully met each year. It may be safely stated that scarcely half of our New York morning and evening newspapers return an adequate profit.

That $500,000 loss compared to $7 million in today’s dollars (according to Slate), which pales in comparison to the $85 million the Boston Globe expects to lose this year alone. But Villard highlights the unique business model many newspapers used to support.  He claims owners were willing to accept losses in their newspapers because of the prestige of owning one.  Slate puts it: “A newspaper owner gets a place at every table, access to all the top politicians’ ears, and the power to impose his worldview on his readers—or, at least, the illusion of such influence.”

Few businessmen are willing to make such expensive vanity purchases (Slate makes some notable exceptions, like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post or Mortimer Zuckerman’s New York Daily News).  Of course, stock markets, quarterly reporters, and multi-billion dollar sales turned the newspaper business into a profit boon for the 80s and 90s with few expecting the bubble to burst.

For naysayers predicting the demise of democracy should newspapers all disappear (unlikely), the vanity business model represents only one of many, many options to develop news and other businesses. I doubt this trend will take the business world by storm, but the history lesson is worth noting – business isn’t always about money. There’s power and influence too. I’ve been a proponent of the value of self-promotion (like this blog), but maybe even multi-billion dollar corporations have a place in a vanity portfolio.