Rupert Murdoch anounced today that he’ll be moving his online news sites to a subscription model very soon. When Rupe promises to take money of you, you can believe him.
Will the punters go for it though. Most of Rupe’s publications are arguably not specialist enough to demand a fee for online access. There are undoubtedly some outfits who can make it pay. Fin Review springs to mind. Or the Wall Street Journal. They’re offering premium content to a very defined market.
But what is the Terror offering? Access to Andrew Bolt?
I dont see the public rushing the turnstiles to get in on that sweet deal. The other problem he has is being out in front. If you are the first to charge for general news coverage, why should anybody pay up when they can get the same coverage free at other outlets. In fact it would pay his competitors to hang on and wait for News to shed online readers, because they’d probbaly pick them up.
Just some drug addled thoughts as I wait for my bath to run.
You’re right. It’ll only work for premium services, unless he’s thinking of charging as a wholesaler throughout his own network and cutting off the retail corners of his empire to wear the risk at the coalface. Don’t fkn know. Don’t fkn care. He can shove The UnAustralian and the rest of it up his arse
The Deathstar offers only one thing – quantity. There are occassional gems in it. But I for one wont be paying a fee.
Before I get flamed and fragged. I followed UseNet for the gladitorial contests and the rare diamond. You got to wade through shit to get the rare good stuff.
There – a starting point.
Now where was that bunker.
I can’t see it working. The content is too general and no-one is going to pay for something they can get for free elsewhere. It’s not even worth paying for the printed copies of News Ltd papers let alone subscribing to the online content.
Not unless everyone other big meeja playa demands payment for content as well. And there’ll always be some big player who doesn’t – all their economic models are currently operating (presumably perfectly well) based just on freely avail content and ad revenue, unless they’re running at a loss and being quietly subsidised somehow which I doubt.
Concur wholeheartedly with the Squire. Farque him with a bent and rusted tractor crank.
Rupert I mean, not the Squire. I trust that is self-evident.
The “last one standing” scenario of pay-walls suggests that, you don’t implement a pay-wall for your content until you are the last one on the internet providing that content – because if you ask people to pay for it they will just go elsewhere. The problem is, with the minimal startup costs involved, you can never be the “last one standing”. There will always be someone offering their work for free as a way of “getting their foot in the door”.
Going to a paywall now – at least means that some funds are coming in and at some point quality content needs to be paid for. Internet Advertising is getting hit by people installing ad-blockers on their browsers, so even sites that get high page views aren’t necessarily making any return on it because of the culture of information entitlement. Why should you provide that content for free on your website if the majority of the people that are accessing it block the advertisements you are serving?
Hes got no idea. He was wrong about MySpace and hes wrong about this.
Things are changing all over. Channel 4 in England – they do shows like Time Team and Grand Designs have eliminated their blogs since April 30. I only discovered this today.
See here :http://community.channel4.com/eve/forums/a/frm/f/8896096411
Evidently as a cost cutting measure. You can comment – and that’s it. Their Moderator costs (according to the blurb) was in the hundreds of thousand of pounds. Pity – some of the information on those blogs was fascinating.
But it does show a shift in the British approach and Ruperts decision would have been done out of the same environment.
The problem becomes that a significant portion of the media market is tied into Ruperts Deathstar. A lot of on line material references these News Ltd publications. At the end of the day its about content – if the largest content provider is going to charge? Hooh hah! The smaller fish will have to follow – just to maintain parity.
The Electronic Frontier is going to shrink folks. Pay as you go has arrived.
Lobes you may be right. What’s the work round?
I concur, no one will pay, for as long as someone else provides it for free. I wonder if a site will emerge as a clearing house for “Big Story” investigative journalism. I reckon I’d pay for that. But I havn’t yet shelled out for a Crikey subscription yet – so perhaps not.
I heard a great quote once. Journalism is what somenone wants you not to write. All else is PR.
Orin, interesting on the Ad blocker software – any ideas how they (the advertisers) will get around it? It sh!ts me that I’m spending my download limit on inbedded video ads.
Anyone else watch the Media Watch 20th aniversary show? Not what I had hoped for but a good watch & interesting on the Campbell Reed Trophy backstory and it’s always good to see the Saffran Vs Ray Martin footage.
NWB : Saw it. Cracker of a show. Now that MW is haunting the blogosphere – wonder when Blunty gets in their gun?
The thing that will be interesting will be the defamation aspect. There is a meme out there that brave citizen-journalist-bloggers are going to take up where the mainstream media left off. One of the advantages that large media has over small media is that large media is a harder target to hit with legal action. Citizen-journalist-bloggers don’t have a legal team to vet what they post and in most cases will be up shit creek if someone fires the threat of a lawsuit at them. It is only going to take a few well publicized smackdowns by well resourced litigants before citizen-journalist-bloggers decide that it is easier to run a blog about cats than it is to report on issues of substance on those that have power.
I shell out for Crikey (I’m in my second year of subbing) – it is more informative than what is available for free online and has a fair amount of content. Usually takes me at least half an hour to get through – though it usually turns up around 2pm. What’s available in terms of free online news in Oz is pretty ordinary.
In terms of add blocking – expect an arms race between the the add-blockers and the servers. That is as soon as a site puts in a redirect for people with add blockers, the add blockers will attempt to get more sophisticated. A good number of people who run add blockers do not believe that there should be any form of renumeration for producing web content.
7 minutes of top thinks Orin.
Thanks mate.
I think you are dead right about the litigation, until we have a fair comment defence to our libel / defamation laws. When pigs fly and a monkey will fly outa my ass.
I dont envy the neighbours on the other side of the Pacific for much, but that freedom of speech thingy is a doozy.
When they ban pop up ads I’ll think about losing adblocker. Those ones that spring out of the page and obscure all the text are ridiculous.
Brian I think MW would understand Birmos brand of irony & tounge in cheek p!ss taking.
They just don’t particularly groove on racial villification, plagiarism & poor professional pselling.
You do know Lobes that all browsers (including IE) support pop-up blocking without blocking advertisements. Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari and Chrome do this by default. You don’t need an add blocker to block pop-ups.
I did not know that. I followed the herd and got adblocker
Unless they’ve got live gun cam footage on the Steyrs or M4′s I won’t be paying for it.
What will probably happen is that you’ll get a more divergent internet. A premium Internet and what we’ve got now. The premium internet will always be small until it becomes common wisdom that you cannot make a buck without having some way to make a buck.
Look at twitter – lots of fun, hours spent on it, but doesn’t make anyone a cent. How long can that last?
At the moment we have still have a dot-com mentality that you can run a free site at a loss and that somehow, at some point, a profit will turn up at the end of the rainbow. As long as venture capitalists keep buying into it, the rainbow chasing will continue. People are still pouring money into Twitter and Google is losing a bundle each day on YouTube (it costs them money each time you watch a video).
But ideas die hard and what we remember is that a whole bunch of people made a lot of money creating internet real-estate at the end of the 90′s. I know a guy who ran a free site that made more than a million selling it to another company – I also know that the company ended up closing the site eventually because it just never made money. We all want to be that guy – a year’s work with a million dollar payoff. This meme will take a long time to die. At some point Google will say “this youtube thing is never going to make us money because people won’t pay for it”. What happens to Youtube then?
MOko – and that’s why God invented U-Boob.
Orin : You’ve got the brave new world of citizen journalism neatly wrapped up. The biggest problem the journo pundits are targetting is fact checking. A few libel cases or copyright violation, and it will happen in the States as well – and people will be very careful. Hmm . . .might bear watching any moves towards intellectual property rights like what they tried with music and books.
And then . . . someone will shell out the bucks for a staff and away we go again. What is happening and this will accelerate – is that journalistic diversity will shrink. Too much material is sourced from bureaus these days or down out right plagiarised.
I am always amused at the “well, it all comes from Reuters or AP anyway” argument. True – but Reuters and AP can afford to generate all that content because they have all those paying subscribers. The wire services won’t be able to fund themselves if a substantial number of their client news services go to the wall.
Heh. Trouble with centralised wire services is that they can’t fact check all the independents they use. Spin, spin, spin. BBC has gone down the same track.
Media Watch was interesting in one respect Laws, Jones, print journos all mentioned their work as being an entertainement medium rather than an informative one. True enough. Infotainement – its always been there. So is a show like Media Watch.
Hope that makess sense. Good night all.
If it was a quality news outlet, or a specialized one like the WSJ (which I don’t read, so I guess I wouldn’t pay), I might consider doing it….but his biggest paper here in the US is absolute crap, so I wouldn’t consider it for a second.
Of course, my local paper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution is getting smaller and smaller (I was horrified to see they eliminated the beer reviewer in their weekly food section), so eventually I may have no choice but to get news online, and that’s when they’ll zap me.
sadly most people in the UK seem to think that the “metro” (a free newspaper given out at tube stations, which culls its news form the internet mostly)) fulfills their news needs- so teh answer is prob no…
a couple of thoughts.
Google gets a large part of it revenue from click through advertising, the sponsored links on the top of the page and the side. None of those are stopped by adblockers. I had a conversation last year with a guy who had one of those sponsored links, he runs a miniskip business. Each click by me cost him $.025, Plus an extra cent every time his company was highest on the search list and that was clicked on.
The cost of producing a newspaper has never been subsidized by the reader, it has historically turned a profit primarily through advertising and classifieds. The reader subsidizes little more than the newsagents fees and distribution.
The ads i see when visiting BT for example are more often than not personalized to me based on cookies from other sites i have trawled and the stories I am reading.
my point is this, advertising to revenue ratio is all ready there and has been used by newspapers for 100 years. The method of earning money from ad’s on the net is already making money for google, that business model is there for anybody to see. And the ads i see on BT and other news sites are the ones i am more likely to click on. They are more than likely different to the ones others see.
Ruperts issues are that he is strongly disinclined to let go of the old technology for supplying news – print on paper, and let it go digital. That is where he earned his bones and proved he was better than his old man. He is even talking about a digital news reader for newscorp products so he can keep control of the medium, something he has with paper.
Non subscription general news sites will work, they just need to mold the old model into the new.
Isn’t he dead yet? I swear, Rupert is a f*ken Zombie.
You cant put the genie back in the bottle IMHO. This free flow of information is going to continue as long as there is a viable internet.
If regular TV had millions of different channels in the beginning then pay TV would never have got off the ground. Same principle applies here. Murdoch is trying to create a market where there is no demand.
What we may see in the future in terms of media and the dissemination of information is probably going to be closer to pirate bay then News.com
News crawlers and trend analysers combined with webcams and monitoring of official communications channels all rolled up into one unholy AI is a possibility. We may see the return of more freelance journalists a la Tin Tin, who knows. I just doubt its going to be decided by guys in Delaware holding spreadsheets. Didnt AOL try a premium internet and it died?
The revenue generated by online advertising for a site is a small fraction of the revenue generated by print advertising. The advertising to revenue ratio isn’t there. Advertisers will not pay anything within an order of magnitude of the same rate to display an advert on a website that they pay to place and advertisement in a print publication.
Google is making money because of the billions of pages that they serve up.
There was some figures published recently that looked at a hypothetical newspaper going completely online and keeping exactly the same audience (in terms of page views) that they got with their current circulation. Even with the substantially reduced cost of not having to redistribute the physical paper (which was partly of set by the cover price) they were getting 5% of the revenue from web based advertising (for the same number of eyeballs) that they got from print advertising. To generate the same revenue as they did in print, they had to increase their readership to 20 times their current circulation.
Interesting.
My immediate reaction is against payment. However, if Rupe could demonstrate a marked improvement in the quality of journalism being produced, I might consider it. For the current stuff? No. But you guys have made a good point about wire services. I’d certainly be more willing to keep Reuters and AP going than Deathstar… maybe I could take my subscription monies there?
AS for citizen bloggers – for me it’s time. How does one become a citizen blogger? How does one get the time to follow up stories, chase leads, go out, meet people, write etc – do you do it on top of your other job? Do you start with nothing, and hope to build?
Good journalism takes time. I’m in radio, so I’m generally time-constrained. But even the print journos these days are losing time – job cuts, cost cuts and the pressure to produce for online has reduced in many cases the time they can spend on a story.
If I was to set up my own blog to investigate Brisbane-based issues, would any of you pay for it? Particularly those of you interstate or O/S, for whom the content would have little meaning?
Citizen bloggers have to live too, and I think I would have to set up a pretty amazing blog/service with a proven track record before I could hope to earn any money off it from either subscribers or advertisers.
Just my two cents.
Please make The Sun pay for, please make The Sun pay for.
Recently, a friend made an interesting quote from an article he’d read. The world needs journalism, it doesn’t need newspapers.
In a perfect world, I’d be happy to pay for a news aggregation site that gave me articles about science, technology, JB, the area I live in, stormtrooper/stargate crossover slash fiction and cycling. When I say pay for I may actually consider paying or would probably cope with advertising funded, although most businesses would rather accept cold hard cash rather than having to sell advertising. Sadly, they usually decide they can have both.
Newspapers need a business model which can fund their massive printing presses. In an online world where a few thousand dollars can pay for the infrastructure for you to feed articles into a news aggregation service that pays you for your articles based on the number of subscribers. This model should in theory drive articles which people want to read. Sure, you’ll get your celebrity gossip and sensationalism, but because I’m willing to pay money for quality articles about geek stuff, then good journalists (that I can rank as I read articles on whether I care to read more from them) will produce articles on topics that there is sufficient interest in.
I think it will be a draw. The fee Rupert pays me to visit his dreck punditry sites equals the fee he could charge for the real news sites.
It will be like this for everyone in the world, at least until Rupert shuts down the punditry sites and offers only quality content.
Rupert doesn’t (or just doesn’t want to) get it – newspapers are doomed, their 19th & 20th century business model is unsustainable in the internet age and that’s just a fact. What will replace them? No one knows, yet. Blogs like HuffPo, etc. are probably a part of the answer, but however it pans out the old days of Rupert and the print barons are dead and buried. And nothing will bring them back. Nothing.
I’m quite pleased to see Rupert trying so desperately to cling onto the old ways as he nears his end though – he can pass on knowing his life’s work is collapsing around him. Just deserts.
The problem with channel 4 is that it is both publically funded and receives advertising revenues. Both are down at the moment. it’s a real shame as as a TV channel it has prodcued some amazing progs and also shows (or rather showed) a vast range of programming not found elsewhere (even on the beeb).
As for Evil overlord Murdoch, well he can get stuffed. It’s only premium quality sites like the Economist or Janes that can get away with charging not the tat that his compnaies produce. It’s probably linked to his purchase of the Wall Street journal, all of a sudden he thinks he’s bloomberg.
Have suddenely remembered that i should have been at an industry breakfast this morning, what an idiot!
It would be interesting to see the figures on existing digital subscriptions for newspapers. These can be accompanied by the regular newspaper being delivered, or simply digital only.
I can’t think of a newspaper site to which I’d subsribe on the web. For example, if BT went subscription only, I’d be Bluntyless.
I think that the culture of physically holding a newspaper, doing the crosswords and puzzles and cutting out letters to make ransom notes will survive. Newspaper is also handy for shaping papier mache likenesses of the ‘guests’ one has chained up in the basement. Nothing like getting their facial likenesses down to a tee, frozen at the point they see the giant rat. Or is that just me?
I’d choose Blunty any day over WSJ or any News Corp-related outlets.
My answer is simple: Fuck No!
Chaz, at least you didnt forget to turn up for a live radio interview this morning. Oh well, I would have infected them all anyway.
Chaz, JB – I blame Havock and his Manflu.
People pay to watch Fox News, there will always be someone willing to be told what they want to be told.
The future Cheeseburger may have a pay per view webcam of the bunnies at work soaping up the disco balls & the pay per view industry has proven to have a very willing subscriber base to that service.
JB and did you get any thanks for you’re thinking of others? i bet you didn’t.
Brian, why use manflu as a reason? just blame havock, he’s an easy target, just like Naut!
Chaz. It was a twofer offer. Last I seen of the boy he was waxing ecstatic about eye liner(go to Tweet) – I think the lurgy’s done something to his brain cells.
If he goes through with it with Australian news websites, it will be good news for us here at Aunty. :)
wenches..wenches and eye liner on dem. now if Murdok Mcmurdoh!, can get wenches and eyeliner on he blog in real time..i just might cough up…nahhh..fuck him.
But Gary, surely the new Digital Futures ABC will be subscriber only, they don’t expect to go on getting all that cushy taxpayer loot? I mean 8c/person/day! it’s an outrage!
Word I heard last year was the podcasts were to be become pay-per-pod, I was a touch put-out as I’m RN’ing approx 10 hours / day either live to air or Podded.
and as for the resta the shit about blaming ME..well..Tall poppy comes to mind. At least i give you lot something to look up too, you know, aspiration, what you could attain if you were even half as good would be better than that which has been attained already ad that which you currently seek to attain as well.
“now if Murdok Mcmurdoh!, can get wenches and eyeliner on he blog in real time..i just might cough up”
Well if you say so. One paid subscription to THE SUN for Mr Havock ASAP please!
Lobes : Zing!