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Murdoch Says, "We'll Charge For All Our Sites"
Oracle Goddess writes "In what appears to be a carefully planned suicide, Rupert Murdoch announced that his media giant News Corporation Ltd intends to charge for all its news websites in a bid to lift revenues, as the transition towards online media permanently changes the advertising landscape. 'The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution, but it has not made content free. Accordingly we intend to charge for all our news websites,' Murdoch said."
That's one way to ensure nobody reads his stuff.
Well. It might be a decent business plan. He might gain more money but less readership. Long term, i'm not sure that's such a good strategy but in the short term it might work just fine. Ad revenue can't be that good.
"In what appears to be a carefully planned suicide..." Is it possible to mod a story submission as flamebait?
Translation: "We have too much traffic on our websites so plans are in place to drop that volume of visitors dramatically."
Online news has been stuck in a prisoner's dilemma situation (from their POV). If everyone charged for news, then they'd be OK. When only some people charge for news, those that charge lose their audience. That drives the system to the equilibrium of noone charging for news. From the consumer's POV this is a good thing.
Because Murdoch owns so much of the news, he might be able to break out of the current poor (for newspaper publishers) equilibrium. Of course, if he can do so then he's pretty much demonstrated that he has enough of a monopoly that market power isn't working. There would be evidence for an anti-trust case against him.
The other problem with all this is that it assumes that the problem newspapers are having with revenue is caused by the cannibalisation of the print editions by the online editions. I understand, although I cannot provide evidence, that the real problem is that the classified market has gone away. The newspapers lunch got eaten by eBay and Craigslist, not cannibalised by their own online offerings. And if this is true, then raising prices for consumers might increase revenue, but it wont return it to where it was.
Maybe you can get that from a typical hosting company, who oversells their capacity and bet that nobody uses even a fraction of it and who has one administrator for a whole low rent data center... But real servers (dedicated servers, not virtuals crammed 100 to a box), full capacity pipes, and dedicated administrators with a triple nine data center cost considerably more.
On top of which, you conveniently forgot the cost of providing content - which isn't cheap.
Everyone clamoring for Free.. that's just not the way the world works. Toss em out -you wont need masses of readers anymore to support ad revenue- and let us pay you a fair price for the service you tender. Why would someone even think that they would make their newspapers available for free? Is this some kind of base assumption we run on that everything on the internet should be free and we just flush the bills down the toilet? What's happening is they incur cost producing Content and then they give it away for free. What kind of crazy business model is that, you make NO PROFIT. Strip off all this advertising crap. Charge for premium content. Turn the web into a real, competitive marketplace. We can dig deeper so only for actual content and services by the way
So what you're saying is that we should put you in the category of people that just don't get it?
I can't speak for anyone but myself but:
I don't expect newspapers to be available for free on the internet--at least I don't expect anything that resembles the sunday print edition of the NYT to be there for free. The problem is that there is no effective way to charge for them the way there is for physical newspapers. Sure you can do authenticated logins and accounts--but all you've done is made electronic versions of the old way of doing it, and nothing has changed then. In fact, it is a step backwards for the flow of information if you could actually make that work--no more borrowing the paper from the guy in the next cubicle. So what you seem to be advocating is a move to a world with even less freedom of information than we had two decades ago.
The internet is designed to move information from place to place as cheaply as possible. Trying to artificially inflate the price won't work. We can't make computers that aren't good at copying information (they wouldn't be computers then).
I don't know what business model they should come up with. There might not be one, period. Oh well. There wasn't one before the printing press either. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away. Buggy makes don't have a business model anymore, neither do the people who made player-piano rolls. Nor flint-lock manufacturers. There's a ton of Benedictian monks out of work thanks to the printing press. Just try finding someone to make a good Roman piss-pot for you these days.
What I don't understand is why you think it is a bad thing that this might happen. The de-corporatization of news media is the BEST possible thing that could happen to this country right now. We should not be looking for ways to preserve corporate control of information.
I think it's really quite sad that Slashdot viewers think they understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch. All that crazy hubris could be used someplace more effective.
I don't have to think I understand the industry better than Rupert Murdoch to think this is a questionable move. I wouldn't be surprised if Murdoch himself thought this was a bit of a gamble. The reality is that right now Rupert Murdoch is between a rock and a hard place. He initially went with the free ad-based model because it was clear that subscription models were only working in special cases. Apparently the free approach is failing, and he's resorting to a subscription model as plan B.
Some types of media just aren't going to survive the changes the internet is bringing, and newspapers may be one of them. I don't think I know better than Rupert Murdoch. I think he knows that his industry is in trouble too. It will be interesting to see if he finds a way to convert his resources into something workable in the future.
Newspapers are not free, books are not free, movies are not free. All these mediums have people behind them. People like you that like to eat. To buy clothes. To ensure their kids have a great Christmas.
... and the same was true with buggywhip manufacturers, and telephone operators who manually connected every phone call, and GM. Why should I have to bail them, or you, out?
I hate this analogy, and Slashdot is absolutely the worst proponent of it.
Buggywhip manufacturers, manual telephone switch operators, monks who manually copied documents, etc., all lost their jobs because they no longer added value to society and/or their employers. No one needed buggywhips when cars supplanted horse-drawn carriages, no one needed a person to switch calls if a computer could do it faster and cheaper, and no one needed monks to manually copied documents when the printing press could do it faster and cheaper. That all makes sense.
The analogy fails for media because people still want media, and still want media to be created by media creators (writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc.). In other words, the media creators still add value to society and/or their employer. The media's value is in its creation, not in its distribution.
And as everyone loves to point out, distribution costs can go to $0 or close to it...but creation costs do not. You still have to pay writers, musicians, filmmakers, artists, producers, etc., to create the media. If you choose not to pay your media creators, then you end up with amateurs recording home movies of their cats doing stupid things and uploading them to YouTube. Which has yet to make a profit for anyone.
So, no, news and reporters are not on par with monks who copied documents thousands of years ago. They are reporting news, and there is still value in, and demand for, that.
I have NEVER seen an accurate newspaper article on a subject I was conversant in. Not once. Which leads me to believe they're equally worthless on subjects I'm not conversant in as well.
Michael Crichton says something similar (though you have shown yourself to be an exception) in his speech Why Speculate ?.
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
"That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.
"But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia."
Squirrel!
>the Times (or, for non-Brits, the London Times) is a serious newspaper
This would be the newspaper that claimed public interest in revealing the identity of the anonymous police blogger, stopping his inside information from seeing the light of day and reaching the public, yes?
The Times at one time was not owned by Murdoch. It was a serious newspaper. He bought it and the rot began.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce