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Murdoch Demands Kindle Users' Info
In yet another move to display how antiquated and completely ignorant of digital culture he is, Rupert Murdoch has started demanding that Amazon hand over user info for all Kindle users. This demand comes right after Murdoch just finished negotiating a larger share of revenue from Amazon sales. At least Amazon hasn't decided to comply with this request yet. "'As I've said before, the traditional business model has to change rapidly to ensure that our journalistic businesses can return to their old margins of profitability,' Murdoch said. 'Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting.'"
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/08/05/murdochs-ultimatum-to-amazon-give-us-the-names-or-else/
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Here's one.
Would have been helpful to include in the original article.
Murdoch's ultimatum to Amazon: Give us Kindle subscriber names or else
Jeff Bercovici
Aug 5th 2009 at 7:00PM
Rupert Murdoch's mad as hell, and he's not going to take it anymore. High-handed treatment from Amazon, that is.
On News Corp.'s (NWS) fiscal-year-end earnings call with analysts, the notoriously shoot-from-the-hip mogul suggested that The Wall Street Journal will cease to be available on the Kindle e-reader unless Amazon starts offering a more generous revenue split and more publisher-friendly policies.
Murdoch acknowledged that the Journal recently negotiated a slightly larger share of the revenues Amazon gets from selling Kindle subscriptions to the paper, "but it's not a big number, and we're not encouraging it at all because we don't get the names of the subscribers," he said. "Kindle treats them as their subscribers, not as ours, and I think that will eventually cause a break with us."
Jeff Bezos, consider yourself warned.
On the call, News Corp. announced adjusted full-year operating income of $3.6 billion, a 32 percent year-over-year decline largely attributable to the advertising recession afflicting print and broadcast television. Much of the call was devoted to News Corp.'s intensive drive to get consumers to pay directly for digital content of all kinds. Murdoch revealed that the company plans to introduce pay models for all its news websites by the end of the next fiscal year. Moreover, he said that it won't be only the newspaper sites that adopt this change; foxnews.com, he said, will also start charging for content. "It has a huge and loyal and profitable [web] audience already," he said.
"As I've said before, the traditional business model has to change rapidly to ensure that our journalistic businesses can return to their old margins of profitability," Murdoch said. "Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting."
Other highlights from the call:
-Murdoch on this year's television advertising: "We're doing well, or we think we're doing well, on the pricing, but we'll probably keep more back for the spot market than last year....There's money around. I'm not saying there's a vast recovery or anything like that, but we are in the process of reaching understandings with a lot of advertisers."
-On whether News Corp. will develop its own e-reader to compete with the Kindle: "We're not in the hardware business."
-On rumors that Guardian Media Group may close the Observer: "I did read that document that went to the staff of the Guardian that swore allegiance everlastingly to the Guardian but said nothing about the Observer. I think I made the same conclusions as everybody."
-On whether News Corp. would buy the Observer: "Hell no. Why?"
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For those of you joining late, for the first few minutes the Slashdot story didn't link to the Daily Finance story.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It looks to me like he is not requesting every kindle users info (as the headline suggests). But he is requesting that when a user subscribes to The Wall Street Journal via a kindle, they are a customer of TWSJ and not Amazon. Sounds reasonable to me. That way the user could change devices and keep their subscriptions.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Look at what we have now - 'free' news sources that don't give us much news but give us a whole lotta opinion masquerading as news (blogs, anyone?).
Yes, whereas the news that we pay for (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc) is all 100% news, certainly no opinions or bias there. Seriously, until I hit the parentheses, I honest to God thought that those were the news outlets you were talking about. More than 90% of what most people would call 'real news' is opinion at best, political hatchet jobs at worst.
I will agree, however, that it is unlikely that a free, unbiased news source will pop up any time soon on its own. The people who care enough about getting news to others are the same ones with strong opinions that will inevitably filter into their reporting. Maybe if we get a publicly funded news organization similar to the BBC, but even that is vulnerable to bias since the money will be coming from whomever is in control of the budget at the moment.
Nah, he's right. The WSJ 10 years ago was a great paper, with little political commentary and little political bias beyond "business owners good, unions bad". A few years ago it took a dive into the deep end of the political douchbaggery pool, injecting over-the-top right wing craziness into stories almost at random. As a result the readership suffered significantly. Under RM's reign it has moved more than halfway back to what it was, and shows promise that ot will continue in that direction.
Murdoch isn't interested in advocating a particular political point of view, he just wants money. He saw that all cable news networks were left-leaning, and realized that a right-leaning network should automaticaly steal half the viewers, even if it was pretty crappy. And he was right - Fox News gets about half of all cable news network viewers, not through any hint of quality but simply by being the only right-leaning voice. Great business sense.
The WSJ OTOH has made less money with every step to the right it has taken for the past ten years. People buy it for unbiased business news, but they hadn't been getting that for a while. RM saw there was money to be made by walking it back, and no doubt it will end up with whatever amount of political bias will maximise sales.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
you're probably dyslexic... Discover starts with 6011
If you sell 1000 e-copies through Amazon, and 0.1% of your readers write you back, you have to spend time reading and acting on 1 piece of mail.
If you sell 1M e-copies, you'll have 1000 pieces of mail to respond to.
The "incremental cost" per 1,000 copies is very small though compared to either print, or to a lesser degree, hosting it on your own web site and doing all the account-management and bandwidth in-house.
I've heard things like a typical American big-city for-profit newspaper's subscription fee barely covers the cost of of the paper, ink, and delivery, and sometimes not even that. The costs of creating the content are borne pretty much entirely by advertisements.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Rules_Of_The_Internet