There are sometimes doubts about US brands overseas and whether they enjoy the same influence and respect as they do at home. I wonder, however, whether the opposite is a bigger worry.

The thought is prompted by talking to senior executives of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, the US hotel chain that owns brands including Sheraton, Meridien, W, Westin, and St Regis.

Starwood has been refurbishing half of its 200 Sheraton hotels in the US at a cost of $1.4bn because it wants to bring them up to the standard of Sheratons in countries including China. There are 50 Starwood hotels in China already, and a further 75 in development.

“The standard is very high in China and we did not want our Chinese guests one day to come to the US and be disappointed,” says Frits van Paasschen, Starwood’s chief executive.

Sheraton is far from the only well-known US brand that has a stronger brand image in emerging markets than in its home country. Buick is well respected in China while GM, its parent company, is still trying to revive its  reputation at home.

Similarly, KFC outlets in China often look smarter than many of those in the US, although it is owned by Yum Brands and had its origins in Kentucky. The same has been true of McDonald’s in Europe and Asia compared with McDonald’s in the US.

In some ways, it is only natural for mature brands in the US to have a better shot at reinventing themselves in overseas markets, where they have no legacy problems. One reason why Starwood hotels are rated highly in China is that its hotels there are newer.

All the same, it casts an interesting light on concerns about whether foreigners respect US brands. Some 80 per cent of guests at Sheraton hotels in China, for example, are Chinese.

Rupert Murdoch’s talks with Microsoft about removing his newspapers’ stories from Google, and giving the rights to index them to Microsoft’s Bing, could be a pivotal moment in internet economics.

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.

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.

Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review did some calculations the other day and suggested that the Journal gets less than $12m a year in advertising to people who come to its site through Google, although it accounts for 23 per cent of the Journal’s traffic.

The [New York] Times typically gets about twice the traffic the WSJ does. For simplicity’s sake (I don’t know if the WSJ gets more or less per unit of traffic than the NYT does), let’s say the Journal will get half what the Times will in online ad revenue this year, or $51 million. If all visitors were equal (and they’re not!), that would imply Google brings just $11.7 million a year in ads or $978,000 a month.

In fact, as he says, this estimate is probably too high because it equates the yield from advertising to people who arrive at the Journal site through Google with the yield from advertising to paid subscribers. In practice, advertisers are willing to pay far higher rates to reach paid subscribers.

As I pointed out the other day in a column for the FT, advertisers (correctly) do not value random traffic from search engines on a par with paying subscribers. The former are readers while the latter are customers who are signalling loyalty to the product.

So traffic drawn to news sites through links and search engines is better regarded as a marketing device to attract subscribers than as a big revenue stream. The Journal’s policy of giving away some of its stories and charging for others is thus a “freemium” strategy.

Mr Murdoch appears to have decided he will not lose very much by ditching Google traffic and even a fairly small payment from Microsoft would compensate. He is attempting to get distributors to pay for content in the way that US cable operators pay cable networks for programming.

He may have got the idea from the fact that Google was willing to pay News Corp $900m three years ago for the right to provide search and sell advertising on MySpace until 2010. The deal has not worked as planned because MySpace’s traffic has fallen below target.

Presumably, any payment from Microsoft for the right to index news would be a lot lower than this, even if it included rights to advertising revenue from people clicking through to News Corp sites.

Nonetheless, the principle does not strike me as far-fetched, even if we have yet to find whether he can pull it off. If the revenue from search traffic is low, why not swap it for something else?