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News Corp Will Charge For Newspaper Websites
suraj.sun writes "Rupert Murdoch says having free newspaper websites is a 'flawed' business model. Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation's newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a 'malfunctioning' business model. Encouraged by booming online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal, the billionaire media mogul last night said that papers were going through an 'epochal' debate over whether to charge. 'That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal's experience,' he said."
If the content is interesting. I guess there's something "flawed" in Bob's business model as well.
Task Mangler
Well, he does cite the Wall Street Journal, I'm not sure how "booming" they actually are but he at least has an example to back up this move.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Its going to be said hundreds of times in this thread, but I'll say it anyway.
Nobody will pay for content that used to be free.
I'll miss WSJ.com but I'll get over it.
The WSJ's content is as "newspaper of record" for financial items. Which means its unique.
Additionally, how many of those "online" subscribers are dead-tree subscribers?
For most other news, news outlets are substitutable. If you are a substitutable item, but you charge and your competition doesn't, you're out of luck.
Test your net with Netalyzr
WSJ is an outstanding newspaper. Its news articles are unique and important and interesting. New York Post, not so much.
But I would also bet that a lot of success the WSJ has had online has to do with a lot of business expense accounts paying for it.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
People are willing to pay for content in certain areas, particularly finance sources such as the WSJ or Economist, for three reasons... (1) such sources are based on a lot of exclusive research, and so much of their information can't easily be found elsewhere. (2) the nature of finance makes it worthwhile... if you're trading thousands to millions of dollars in securities or bonds, dropping $2 a week on useful information is awfully cost-effective. (3) the target market is pretty affluent and highbrow and thus less likely to blink over this sort of thing (the fact that you're not giving it away for free actually makes it look more prestigious and attractive).
However, these considerations fall apart when you turn to non-niche mainstream news. Looking at the "free" content aggregated by Google News... it's about 50% celebrity gossip, and 50% partisan political bickering with no insightful analysis behind anything. Thanks but no thanks... I'm not paying for any of that, and I doubt many others would either.
THAT is the main problem with newspapers' business models in the current climate. They are trying to compete with online sources by racing to the bottom, and dumbing down their content in hopes of reaching a wider audience. However, their main competitive advantage is in the highbrow market... which is increasingly alienated by this dumbing-down. Produce exclusive highbrow content that can't easily be found elsewhere, and you'll absolutely be in a position to charge. Write endlessly about Anna Nicole's "baby-daddy" and Britney Spears' breakdowns, and you shouldn't expect any revenue beyond advertising because you can find that trash anywhere.
If so people will pay for it. If you are just regurgitating AP and/or Reuters people will not. The Wall Street Journal and The Economist provide something unique, and have been successful with subscriptions (the fact that they cater to moneyed-folk helps too). To a lesser extent the New York Post and Christian Science Monitor provide unique information and may have luck transitioning to a subscription model.
As for the rest of the newpapers that News Corporation owns, yeah I don't think so. Some of the ones that I'm not familiar with may have sufficient unique content, but most of them don't look like it. Good luck making The Sun subscription only. The online portion of that magazine thrives on ignorant (or amused) blog linking, and would loose nearly all of it's traffic if it went subscription only.
Um.... sure they will. Hate t break this to you, but regardless of party affiliation, folks are like you and me.... cheap. If one source of news is free and another isn't, folks will flock to the free.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
While I am not a subscriber, I think people are willing to pay for the Wall Street Journal for their longer, feature-style articles. The WSJ tends to provide perspective, highlight trends, and point out emerging behavior. I'm not sure that this model applies to general news. Content tends to be similar or even identical (e.g. how 90% of all news comes straight from the AP feed). People are unlikely to pay for a story when they can get a nearly identical story elsewhere for free.
Increasingly web users are blocking advertising content using tools like ad-block. This trend will only continue. As a content producer you have little to lose by switching to a pay model. What do you have to gain by giving your content away for free (with advertisements on the page) when increasing numbers of people visiting your site use software to block the very things that bring your site revenue? Most people, if they were aware of the option of blocking all advertisements on the Internet, would take it. How do you cover the costs of generating and serving your content if it gets to the stage where the majority of people block advertisements and aren't willing to pay a subscription fee?
I am "right wing" and do not pay for news. I will go where the information is free and there will always be an unbiased source of free news.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Well, the Wall Street Journal is a good paper though, read by people who have money to spend.
The Wall Street Journal isn't your typical newspaper, it's very nearly a technical journal that is required reading for people of a certain profession. The Journal doesn't report the same news that every other paper does, and it doesn't just rely on AP and Reuters feeds to do the work for them, it actually offers things that are nearly unique in the news industry. That, and only that, is why they can get away with a pay wall.
I would also like to hear how you explain MySpace's massive success
What massive success? Myspace made about $75 million per quarter at peak. Their traffic peaked in Q1 2008, and is down 30% since then. Facebook passed them in April 2008 and now has 3x their traffic. Myspace never made enough of a blip in News Corp. earnings to show up as a line item.
Social networking sites have a life cycle like nightclubs, and it's short. They start, if they're lucky they become cool, they grow, the losers move in, the cool people move out, and they decline. Has-been social networking sites include AOL, Geocities, EZboard, Nerve, Friendster, Orkut, and Tribe. Social networking sites have to be valued like movies - they have to make money over their run. They're not ongoing businesses. There's a long tail of trickling revenue after the peak, as with ongoing sales of DVDs of old movies. But the big money comes early if at all.
That's problem #1 with social networking sites. Problem #2 is that the demographic is terrible from an advertiser perspective. Remember, half of all clicks come from 20% of users, and that 20% buys almost nothing. That 20% of users is Myspace's demographic.
Myspace revenue comes mostly from their Google ads. Think about that for a moment. Myspace is a big site run by a bigger publisher with sizable ad-selling operations. Yet they're running Google ads, from which Google makes most of the money. If Murdoch could make online pay, they'd be selling their own ad space. The advertisers on Myspace are mostly either bottom-feeders (links to pages with more ads and similar junk) or small advertisers who haven't figured out how to opt out of having their ad appear there.
Blurb is free; copying the title into a google bar and clicking on the first free result is also free.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
They need something akin to the news stand price. Free access to headlines & summaries, or you could pay $0.99 to for 24 hour access to all articles.
If I see an article I want to read, I'm not likely to shell out $19.99 for a subscription so I can read the rest of the article. However, I might pay $0.99 to read it. If I find myself doing that regularly, I'd switch to a subscription.
Anyone who has been watching/reading news corp material and comparing it to on the ground reality or watching the daily show at the same time know murdoch and his henchmen are losing grip with reality and receding into delusion.
You're getting your news from a comedy show and you're concerned about Murdoch's grip on reality?
Agreed, I'm not right-wing or into big money but the difference between the 'journal and, say, Newsweek or FoxNews is like the difference between GQ/Esquire and Maxim.
How is MySpace a massive success? It doesn't make any fricking MONEY.
It's not about readership. A zillion readers who don't pay is still useless. Ad revenue, especially internet ad revenue, just doesn't cut it.
What you should be worried about as a consumer of free media is what happens when the New York Times, LA Time, Washington Post, and all the other top-tier papers follow suit? They are dying to do so, I assure you.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Because, by god, "the Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" tell it like it really is and are the true source of news.....
I'm guessing the troll mod is for implying that the right has a monopoly on an echo chamber news source desires. It is intellectually dishonest to deny that human nature and crosses party lines and ideologies.
878659 - yep its prime.
Yep, people do not turn to the WSJ to read George Will's willfully ignorant opinion column. But I can think of no better way to moderate Murdoch's influence than to put a pay wall in front of his newspapers. One can only hope he will also make FOX news a pay-per-view channel.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
What business model? Newspapers pay out the ass to create content, put it online for free, hemorrhage subscribers, and go broke? It's very Web 2.0, I'll give you that.
I think he's right. They're not gaining enough from putting it online for free to justify continuing the experiment. Our (I work for a newspaper) own numbers are still going up, but they're not going up enough...The online revenue isn't going to stabilize at a level that's high enough to allow the business to continue.
I've been harping on flipping the pay model for a while: right now a lot of papers charge for archival data...Stuff that's old, and has a very limited earnings potential...And give away the current stuff for free. If you flip that, and charge for anything in depth for the last 14 days(or so), and then release everything older than that for free, you keep your internet revenue stream, while still driving a viable pay product.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It just shows how bad the news is when a self-described comedy show presents a more accurate picture :(
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
People liked the idea of Britannica in theory; in practice, they hadn't opened a copy since high school. People derided the idea of Wikipedia in theory, but in practice it's useful enough to be a top-10 website.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Those who buy the trash in paper form are rapidly disappearing however, mostly because they can find the same level of garbage online, for free.
The missed concept here, on Murdoch's part, is that people don't even think they 'pay' for the news now in electronic media formats.
Sure we sometimes pay for channels on TV, but pretty much every channel that offers news is offered for free over the airwaves. How is it funded? ADVERTISEMENTS/COMMERCIALS. You hear about OJ, then you see a commercial from Gerber... Etc...
This is actually how most news websites seem to operate right now, which does not appear to be failing.
I'm not sure what premium content Mr. Murdoch thinks he can offer for a fee, but as posted earlier, people will simply choose the source that doesn't charge. Maybe we will have to 'pay' by trying to ignore penis enlargement banners and the new Ford car model... But I think we're all pretty well adapted to doing that anyway.
Fuckem. Let the proof be in the pudding. I hope he takes Faux news along with him to the fail party.
Yes, in the past. Remember that Sir Keith Murdoch, and Rupert himself in his younger days, ran their businesses in the heyday of print publishing. It's the business closest to Murdoch's heart, and the one he knows best.
Murdoch is a shrewd, pragmatic (and sometimes amoral) operator who's good at making money. He's not invincible however. He dabbles in businesses and markets he doesn't understand, and he needlessly antagonises his minority shareholders. He runs businesses that lose money hand over fist.
Trying to get the average Joe to pay for newspaper content may be the caper that finally shows the world that Rupert Murdoch should've quit while he was ahead.
Unless he does something extremely radical, like partnering with Amazon to deliver newspapers wirelessly to Kindles under a subscription model, this is doomed to failure.
"This is actually how most news websites seem to operate right now, which does not appear to be failing."
Well that depends who you talk to. As I understand it most newspapers' print editions are struggling badly due to the pressure from online and their online equivalents aren't making enough to cover the shortfall.
While I struggle to see myself paying for news I do think there's a problem here and that there's a good chance it's going to lead to further dumbing down of news in general as papers / sites are forced to chase page views to make money.
will go where the information is free and there will always be an unbiased source of free news.
In case you weren't aware, journalists are paid with proceeds from newspaper and advertising sales. Accurate, unbiased reporting isn't going to come from folks who blog in their spare time. It comes from professionals.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Tell that to Hearst.
Some of the same things can be said of the New York Times.
Some perhaps, but not many. The venerable grey lady is a pale shadow of her former self and doesn't really hold a candle to the WSJ which is a much meatier paper with much more information value for the money.
No, something else besides level of technicality needs to explain why people are willing to pay for the WSJ.
The Wall Street journal has good original articles on many non-technical and even non financial subjects (their political opinion page, for example, is often witty and insightful). In fact, I would argue that if one were interested in a strictly technical paper then there are even better (and more terse) papers out there that basically cater only to the financial services industry, The Financial Times for example. Also, the audience of the WSJ tends to be upper middle class and higher income which means that they have money to spend and like spending it on fine living so the WSJ attracts more and better high-end advertisers who will pay premiums for access to that upper-crust audience.
Here's a possibility: as another reader pointed out, you are allowed to access WSJ's premium content if you have been referred from another site.
This has been tried before so its not a new idea. The folks at Salon once tried "24 hour day passes" if users would view an ad from one of their advertising sponsers. This was back when Salon was trying to position itself as an "ultra-premium" online magazine that was "paying members only". They no longer do this, so it must not have been too successful.
The value in owning a newspaper is not the profit of distributing the rag, but in the power of your particular spin.
The kind of spin mega-corps like to fund as it subtly promotes their brands and lends them massive lobbying clout.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
For scholars? They don't cite Britannica either. Or look at it, or assess its actual accuracy vs. Wikipedia (about the same). They just invoke its name as better than Wikipedia, evidently without really thinking about what they're saying.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The thing with the Wall Street Journal is that most of the subscriptions are directly paid by companies or else put on the subscribers expense account. It's the same reason that internet access costs you $10.00 per day in a $250.. a night hotel and is free at the $50.00 a night place.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
"Input cell phone number..."
I agree that we can't rely on bloggers to report the news. Bloggers have a role in the big picture though. And simply paying the journalists won't keep them ethical. We need a business model that thrives on the net, and lets journalists write the news that matters, not just the news that sells.
I don't understand. Why do we need newspapers in 2009? Please note: I'm not talking about "news-gathering organizations," but newspapers. Technology has moved on and newspapers have not: By the time they come out, the news in them is always old. Always old. That was one thing in the days before the Internet and before the 24-hour news cycle introduced by CNN and FoxNews and similar channels, but it's very much another thing now and not something that's required by dint of its very existence. Likewise, the costs of producing newspapers are so stratospheric, that producing them is not a smart business decision. Again, once upon a time, that didn't matter: because there were classified and print advertisements. Those are, for all intents and purposes gone.
Newspapers need to die. It's their time. This is not a bad thing. This is not a good thing. It's just the thing. There are other, better ways of distributing the news now. The idea that the only way for people to get news is to have a clump of newsprint pages thrown on your front porch (or in your driveway) every morning is ludicrous and has no relationship whatsoever to the society we live in.
News-gathering organizations need to give up newspapers and find a way to distribute their work profitably on the web. I do not know how to do this, and I realize no one does. But no one is going to figure it out as long as they cling to the idea that the production of the paper is more important than what's printed ON the paper. And that's something that much of the newspaper industry--and apparently you--are still confusing.
Frankly, I think it's best if news organizations remain for-profit. Not just because I don't want my tax dollars to have to subsidize the people who write The New York Times or The Los Angeles Times or any of the other publications that have nothing but contempt for me. But because it will force them to compete and offer better product. I find it more than a little distasteful that you advocate in favor of monopolies in your message; monopolies don't make anything better, they merely ensure that the status quo will never, ever change. But now it has to. And it will do so all the sooner--and much more effectively--if everyone is playing the game and figuring out the best way to one-up the other guy. That's how evolution in business happens.
Newspapers have been ignoring this for decades. News-gathering organizations no longer have that luxury.
--Matthew
"If the lights of Broadway blind me, I won't mind..."
Can we also make MSNBC and CNN pay per view too? Those are just as biased as Fox News.
Associated Press. Associated. Most of the stories that go on news services were written by local newspapers who subscribe to those services...That's the whole point. When you get an AP story from bumfuck illinois, do you really think that the AP has an office there? That they're going to waste their time sending a reporter there?
The AP and Reuters employ very few reporters in comparison to the organizations who feed them their content.
Anyway, the AP was talking about requiring payment months ago. I posted in that thread as well, and, among other things, predicted that newspapers would, again, start charging for their web content.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
the signature is actually refuting the "right-wing" idea of atheism as a religion. Retchdog was so prepared to be offended that he didn't even bother to parse the sentence beyond the spelling error. Congratulations retchdog, you managed to combine a mis-interpretation, an ad hominem and a style over substance fallacy into one tidy flamebait!
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
> claims that a business model which has been evolving for nearly two decades is 'malfunctioning'
>
> A lot of papers that have been around for a long time are either going bankrupt or close to it
> (losing money fast). That leads me to believe there is some kind of malfunction somewhere.
>
> I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying the newspaper business is doing just fine?
A lot of local newspapers have been acquired in the process of megacorp
media consolidation and in the process these papers have become just
another arm of the megacorp. The bean counters take over and run things
and these papers no longer become socially valuable sources of journalism.
What "street cred" they might have had before evaporates in a corporate
fireball.
Like anything else these days... there's more to the story that you're
not being told about.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
On the other hand, the great ignorant unwashed masses the extreme right rely on for political support will not pay for something they can get for free elsewhere.
Although this is a boneheaded move, it will be beneficial because it will shink Murdoch's audience to the point of political irrelevance, which will allow a resurgence of socialism.
I hope not. FOX is the only channel that provides both the "big government is the only solution" and the "government is the problem" viewpoints. In contrast the other channels like CNN or NBC sound like they are personal spokespersons for Speaker Pelosi.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I hear you. Sure, I know the news 'shows' that are on Fox are highly biased, but, I like to watch them. I like to watch CNN, and yes, I know they have a spin too.
Frankly in this day in age, I think one almost has to watch most all of these news channels, and then assemble what you see in all of them to try to gleam the truth and factuality that might be in there.
I figure most of the Fox shows, will balance out the CNN/Big 3/MSNBC, etc.....
Anyone that just watches one these days, IMHO, is lost as to what is going on really. All of them have some good points, all of them have spin, all of them don't cover everything, all of them don't cover all aspects of a situation.
I like to watch them all, and put the pieces together myself.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Accurate, unbiased reporting isn't going to come from folks who blog in their spare time. It comes from professionals.
This just shows how out of it a lot of people are.
The only reason anybody ever cared about "unbiased reporting" was because for a breif period in the 20th Century we had very few alternative outlets to go to if we personally found the reporting unreasonable.
However, we have oodles of outlet choices today, so now nobody gives a crap. In fact, if the story is about something like a hate group marching in my city, or a looming catastrophe that every scientific specialist agrees is coming, supposedly "unbiased reporting" is not only unwelcome, it is morally reprehensible. The last thing in the world we need in this day and age is a bunch of "professionals" controlling our access to information, and hiding their biases from us while pretending they don't have any at all.
[...] people will simply choose the source that doesn't charge.
So one interesting way to look at this is how many news organizations can support themselves from an advertising model?
Advertising requires viewers--you charge for people seeing the ad. If you have 100 websites with the news, you may not have enough viewers to make advertising work. If there are only 10 websites, those 10 may make enough money from advertising for it to be worthwhile.
So you'll always have "free news" just because, eventually, the market will decide which news sources are "the best" and all others will have to find some other way to support themselves or go under.
which only won 5 Pulitzer Prizes last month?
Which is awarded by a liberal New York university (Columbia) with a board that skews left (with a few token exceptions). The Wall Street Journal is hands down a better paper than New York Times and the sales and circulation numbers prove it. The opinion on the Financial Times is mostly just my own, but I also read and enjoy the Economist (another British publication) and I find the British style of financial journalism to have a more international appeal than what is usually found in the WSJ which tends to present a more Americanized perspective on things (no surprise there since it is an American paper and serves a large home market as the primary audience). However, the Financial Times is not really an exact mirror image of the WSJ for the British Audience, the FT is usually a bit thinner, very technical (the WSJ is too, but FT is technical to a fault), and focuses exclusively on financial matters whereas the WSJ branches out a bit into lifestyle materials that are not generally included in FT.
Because they're 10% reporters, and 90% commentators. There's more concrete information in 30 minutes of any nightly network world news broadcast than in several hours of cable "news" broadcasting, depending on when you happen to tune in. From Larry King to Keith Olbermann, to Bill Orielly, it's almost always a bunch of bluster about shit that ultimately doesn't affect a viewer at all.
And it's not for a lack of news. If these channels expanded their definition of newsworthy events to include more than just the US federal government, celebrity news, and missing blonde girls, they would be more worried about trying to fit it all into an hour instead of just trying to find more filler material.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
It's not shit. Rupert, when your products can say the same, let me know.
Bark less. Wag more.
Every major news organization I know of has deliberately spiked or even made up stories at some time in the past. That goes for all of them, including sacred cows such as the The Washington Post, CBS, NBC, and so on and so forth.
Many newspapers have spiked stories because it didn't live up to their political world view. The act of omission is as bad as the act of lying --which by the way, is nothing new to that bastion of Journalism, The New York Times.
If you think Fox is the only organization to have had dishonest journalists, you're very naive.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!