Slashdot Mirror
The Times Erects a Paywall, Plays Double Or Quits
DCFC writes "News International, owners of The Times and The Sunday Times announced today that from June readers will be required to pay £1 per day or £2 per week to access content. Rupert Murdoch is delivering on his threat to make readers pay, and is trying out this experiment with the most important titles in his portfolio. No one knows if this will work — there is no consensus on whether it is a good or bad thing for the industry, but be very clear that if it succeeds every one of his competitors will follow. Murdoch has the luxury of a deep and wide business, so he can push this harder than any company that has to rely upon one or two titles for revenue."
Methinks this will end in tears.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
"Sir, there's something wrong with our servers, or else the reporting service. Look here, at the pageviews count. It's stuck at zero."
And so the downfall begins......
This is good. Two of Murdoch's outlets have deliberately isolated themselves from the wider discussion. I only wish he'd adopt this strategy more widely.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Oh dear The Times doesn't read me read their content. Oh well I guess I'll have to console myself with the many hundreds of other sites that carry substantially identical content. For example if I want right wing rhetoric with my news I can always go to The Mail or Telegraph sites or any number of blogs.
A buck a week to read his garbage paper? Whatever... I'm happy that he's doing this and wish him the best of luck.
because if this eventual-epic-fail causes Rupert Murdoch to lose just some of his monopoly power over the media, the world will be better off for it.
I remember reading about an experiment where one of the online distributors of video games (Valve?) played with game pricing. A $40 per copy game, and found that as they dropped the price closer and closer to $1, their total revenues and # of sales only went up.
Found it! Near the end of this article: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22378
For these business models to work there needs to be a decent micro-payment system. I don't want to get out my credit card for every single website, especially for small amounts, and don't want to pay a subscription for a service I don't know if I will regularly use. Paypal is currently the only real player, and in my opinion they are a bunch of crooks who are playing legal games to avoid having banking regulations applied to them and subsequently having their dirty laundry aired.
National and international banking systems need to get together and figure out a proper micro-payment system (with amount limits so dodgy websites can't drain your account) before this sort of business model will take off. I might be tempted to pay 10 cents to read an article, but not if I have to pull out my credit card on the spot or sign up for a subscription first. Instead what will happen is regular users will sign up and everyone else will go to the free sites. The results being the regulars pay more to cover the running costs and possibly the failure of the website to sustain itself due to loss of ad revenue.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Not that anyone will necessarily listen to me, though obviously they must be listening to Rupert.
I have not bought a newspaper, watched Sky (for anything other than football) for the best part of seven years. Why the hell do they think that I might get my credit card out in order to listen what they have to say, they should pay me for the benefit of listening to them.
I bet that failblog, once posting Murdoch's photo, will have a higher hit count than the Times.
...before Murdoch destroyed one of the greatest newspapers in the world. I'd gladly pay to read the NYT or the Washington Post online, just as I've paid for the WSJ online for a decade, but pay to read Murdoch's crap? Heck, I'd gladly pay money to keep it from showing up in my search results.
I think this is a good concept, though, perhaps a bit spendy. I'd rather see it billed in fractions of a cent pr. page load.
All the people who filter out ads... you should be thankful the industry is trying to find alternate streams of revenue!
Back in the day, when Murdoch started in Australia, his commercial rival was Kerry Packer. Both of them lobbied hard to have media cross ownership laws broken down so they eventually ended up owning most of the Australian media outlets (newspapers and such like). Murdoch left Australia, where his base company Publishing and Broadcast Limited was formed after establishing a strong commercial base with Fox in the US. Murdoch is grooming his son to take over, and he seems even scarier than dad.
Meanwhile, back in Au, Packer died and his son took over who ended up selling off his Broadcast and Publishing businesses to get into Casinos.
The void left behind is utterly bland, and the media cross ownership laws left behind have just allowed companies interested in asset stripping to come in and, well, do what they do.
The only interesting media is Publicly owned, and I hope the BBC will reverse their decision to back away from internet media. It's that kind of thinking that is the future. It's probably time for these old commercial medias to die off anyway having seen what they look like when they die. The irony in all this was to watch the public broadcasters point out that some PBL papers were plagiarising peoples weblogs at the very time Murdoch was talking of paywalls. If they can't develop original content, people will see it's crap, Faux looses advertising revenue and Murdoch just put another nail in commercial media's coffin.
It will be interesting to watch this comedy play out.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The Wall Street Journal is/was almost like that. When he first took it over, the price doubled to $2 then went to $2.50, then to $3, then back down to $2.50, then back to $2 then lastly, my local grocery store is charging the sales tax on top of it which is 6% for a $2.12 paper in my area. It drove me and the damn cashiers batty.
In the meantime, I was still getting the $99 - $109 annual subscription "special" in the mail. I don't like the Morning deliveries on my driveway.
Now, considering that the daily news is available for free - still - and the WSJ exclusive content isn't all that it can be (it pales in comparison to the Economist), I think Murdoch can stick his papers down under.
Thankfully, the Guardian, which has far superior journalism and doesn't seek to ram politics down everyone's throats in "news" stories like News International's papers do (people often talk of the paper being liberal, which on its comments pages is largely true, but they do a good job of keeping it out of their news reporting), remains free for everyone with an extensive back archive. And of course the BBC exists too... thank God.
I can only echo the poster above who said he hopes Murdoch puts up more paywalls. Murdoch's shitty reporting and deliberately biased and bigoted publications have ruined political discourse in this country.
I write bullshit
I wish Murdoch would charge us £1 per time we want to hear him speak. We'd thankfully have the man silenced forever.
...and other media outlets will follow it. The fact that Murdoch has an agenda doesn't mean that he doesn't understand his business.
If you want to see what happens to the effort put into journalism in newspapers paid for by advertising alone, you have centuries of precedent. You have to ask yourself: who is your customer? The person who reads your paper, or the person who buys advertising space? To produce a newspaper/web site designed to increase the number of views/clicks of adverts is a very different skills from producing a newspaper/website designed to amass a loyal readership.
What is more, and especially with the consolidation of advertising brokers (Google, the Walmart elephant in the room), businesses are guaranteed to have dwindling revenues if they rely on advertising alone.
This little test will ultimately go down in flames. The propaganda he spews needs to be spread as far and wide as possible. So they'll either reopen the flood gates or find some other form of wingnut welfare to fund the dispersal of misinformation. The universe of people willing to be paid to be lied to isn't nearly large enough to feed the hunger of such greedy sociopaths. Watch and see. Enjoy.
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway This is the road to hell
if quality is also improved. E.g. more, better and easily searchable content with no ads.
The crap they call their on line edition today I can do without.
It's hinted in the article -- and I've seen it elsewhere -- that if they retain 5% of their current online readership, that counts as a win.
That's a small enough number that my instinct ("Nobody'll pay for it") doesn't feel all that reliable.
Is it just about possible that 5% will pay? I think it's unlikely, but not completely impossible. It'll be interesting to see, that's for sure.
Since news are going proprietory why don't we start an open-source alternative?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It'll be annoying to lose access to the letters page (and make it even less likely that I'll ever get a letter published there), but I won't be paying 100 quid a year and I'll be "wasting" 5 minutes less each day reading that.
People underestimate Murdoch at their peril. He isn't an idiot, even if he did invest in MySpace. This will work, unfortunately.
He isn't expecting people to pay £1/day or £2/week for the content that is available right now on timesonline.co.uk; they've recognised that they're going to need to offer something that no other free news source can. If by subscribing I get to ask questions in a live Q&A with, say, political analysts or MPs (or whoever, idk...) and also access to whatever else they happen to have lined up, then that is something a lot of people in their target readership are likely to go for. The success of this will be decided on the quality and *perceived* value of the extra content.
Interestingly, the same thing is happening with the Sun and News of the World sites.
8 pounds a month, a lot less isn't it? But I think it is the 1 pound per day that people will indeed choke on.
I don't really read news sites myself, I read stories that I found links to. But I don't really go to a newspaper site and just read all the stories. So it would be NOT 1 pound per day, but 1 pound per article. So I just wouldn't.
And because I follow links to several sites, it is also not 1 buck per day, but maybe 20 bucks for all the different sites. And that does hurt, even if you take a monthly subscription.
That is the biggest reason I think this will fail.
People use the net different then a newspaper. When you take a newspaper subscription, you read it like a book. But when you browse the net, you go here you go there. Take in a page here, an article there. The problem isn't paying 1 subscription fee, it is paying dozens.
Lets see, 1 euro for slashdot, 1 for tweakers, 1 for comics.com, 1 for penny-arcade, 1 for the bbc, 1 for the times, 1 for the new york times, etc etc. That is going to hurt pretty fast.
True micro-payments would help, but the amounts would have to be truly tiny. As in a tenth of a cent for an article and that is never going to work.
And anyway, I don't have a credit card and the only Americans who have ever heard of Global Collect are Sony (SOE is the only MMO company in the world to support iDeal (dutch banks) and other countries payment systems (this might have changed in recent years)). So how am I going to pay even if I wanted to. (Oh and for irony, supporting iDeal is cheaper per transaction then credit card payments).
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A lot of very vocal voices on the Internet hate Murdoch, and that's fine. But the reality is, his newspapers and cable channels are wildly popular -- WILDLY popular, at least in the US. They typically trounce their competition by silly-wide margins. And my gut is that there is a large percentage of Murdoch's readership who can't stomach his competition any more than you can imagine yourself watching Foxnews, and that this percentage of folks will pay. He doesn't need everyone who's reading him now to pay, just -- what's the percentage being kicked around? -- 5% or such? He gets that, he makes money, and more importantly, he trumpets that "The Paywall is a resounding success!" (Using the largest megaphone in the land, I might add.) This all but forces his competition to follow suit (let's call them the Hipster Papers...), and you know that the hipsters aren't going to pay, because, well, you're one of them, you've got your reasons. The Death Spiral of The Hipster Papers accelerates.
Murdoch may be one Nehru Jacket shy of being a Bond Villain, but he has thought this out. It is entirely possible that in the pending media apocalypse that is online news distribution, he's the last man standing.
So are they going to charge the same price for electronic and printed editions ?!? Maybe they will find some customers abroad, where the paper edition costs more, but I doubt they will get many customers in UK.
Newspaper paywalls already failed in other countries. Why would it work in the UK? Papers make money from advertising. Asking the readers to pay will drive them away and the advertisers will follow shortly after.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Charging a pound a day to read news is ill-advised. It will transform this man's newspaper from being the anchor media of the community to being just another website for the rich and their wack-job worshipers.
Newspapers a hundred-years ago were the voice and rallying point of the many diverse communities in the USA and the voice of the middle class in Europe. There were many and each had strong and opposing editorial positions. After World War II the newspapers consolidated into a few major corporations and greatly softened their strident editorial positions. They started to become focused on local advertising, legal announcements, and providing a printed 'voice of record' for centralized government and corporate positions and viewpoints.
In the 1980s multiple papers and editions in cities disappeared. Most major cities had only one daily and one 'alternative' weekly for young adults. At the millennium, the function of providing news and advertisements started being done by the web and newspapers began to be perceived as irrelevant. A large number of people born after WWII hated their local established daily because the ultra-conservative editorial board would always take the wrong position on every single issue, year after year. Other middle-of-the-road young people found little in the daily that was useful to their lives. One by one, they stopped buying the local paper as the years went by. Editions of major city papers, NY Times, Washington Post, started being published in minor cities.
The wealthy loved the daily paper. They were deluded into believing that the conservative editorial positions were a manifestation of the political views of the people and not a paid reflection of their own perspectives. They poured millions into the dailys, year after year.
Then a few years ago, a tipping point happened. The amount of money coming in didn't pay the costs of the dailys. The papers went 'thin', losing 50-70% of their daily newsprint and concentrated on food ads, kittens-stuck-in-trees human-interest stories, obituaries, and comics. The young get the functions of a daily paper from the web and cable TV. The old feel just lost and the middle class/aged just don't care as long as the SUV still runs.
The global newspaper kings should make their news outlets and web sites free. The sources that they use to get the information are more interested in getting their positions out to the international public than they are interested in selling stories to newspapers. They will use focused web sites. Centralized 'journalism' will wither and just become a forgotten cultural characteristic of the 20th century. Murdock appears to be too old, too isolated, and too rich to understand this.
Could be Murdoch or could be you, if he succeeds.
When you pay for content on the internet it usually means you give up your real life identity. That combined with what you think (i.e. read) is an extremely valuable commodity.
It is also information that can be used against you should it come to that. It infringes on your right to privacy and to hold your own thoughts.
The internet offers tremendous cost savings over print. Murdoch is an extremely greedy man and too stupid to know how to successfully associate content with advertisement or advertisement with content. Or to successfully make the argument that ads should be paid for even if they aren't clicked on.
The identity driven information Murdoch could glean from you is even greater than anything Google ever imagined.
What Murdoch and the rest of the 'Content Kings' don't get is that content is no longer king.
These guys should be happy that they are getting my attention - that I'm literally paying them attention. You want me to pay money on top of me paying attention? Forget it. The whole world has a press now and there are millions of people out there - with interesting or intelligent or entertaining or titillating or whatever content - that would be just happy for me to paying them attention.
Murdoch seems to be attempting to hypnotise the public into thinking we need his stuff so badly we'll be prepared to pay for it. We don't.
But how many people have a pressing need to see what the Times has to say on a minute by minute basis?
People who follow a link from a news aggregator and want to make informed comments about the article on the aggregator's comment system.
There's no value in having a newspaper that no one reads.
Then explain the major journals published by Wiley, Elsevier, and Springer, which cloak their results on Google and charge an order of magnitude more than this for even a day's access.
Murdoch's outlets won't show up in the search results
That is, unless Murdoch does an "approved cloaking" deal with Google like Springer, Elsevier, and Wiley have done.
Pay walled news is the best thing that could happen to the news industry. Now people will go looking for news elsewhere and they will actually find NEWS. *cough*http://www.unknownnews.org/*cough*
Let me get this straight: You want me to pay a buck a day to cram your propaganda down my throat?
*collapses in a twitching, giggling heap on the floor again*
If you can sell that, get a few fences to paint, you could make a killing!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just look at how much better Salon.com did after their attempt. Remember them?
from the Times to The Guardian for my non-BBC value added news source of the morning. Bye, Times.
For example, the "Wall Street Journal" (WSJ) has excellent reporting and analysis. The WSJ is worth the price that its owners charge, so I willingly pay for a 1-year subscription to the WSJ.
Is "The Times" worth 1 pound per day? Only the market can say for sure.
An interesting but indirect conclusion of my observation is that if a newspaper is so rotten that only free content will attract readers, then the reporters and the editors of that rotten newspaper are being overpaid for the crappy work that they do.
I'm just waiting for MI6 and 007 to stop him again...
I would assume most of their audience is British. The British already have to pay for the BBC news. So why pay for the Times Online when you have access to the BBC by default?
I think it's been a very long time since The Times has been "the anchor media of the community", except in the sense that it's sinking like an anchor (but then, they all are).
It ceased to be the newspaper of record a long time ago, possibly even before Murdoch took it over.
Now it is just an upmarket version of the Sun - http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/ with no tits and longer words.
And in conjunction with this announcement, a permanent way around the paywall in June was announced today.
Rupert Murdoch is delivering on his threat to make readers pay
Saying you're going to stop giving something away is not a threat. It's ridiculous to characterize it in that way.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Let's put it this way: Rupert Murdoch is not Grigori Perelman.
Agree / Disagree?
You can't handle the truth.
Due to the fact that "The Times" has quite a reputation, in the initial stage the scheme will be a relative success. As time goes by however, the paywall will show its ugly teeth. No more external links driving traffic and no more SERPs in Google.
Paywalls fail not because they make people pay, they fail because they effectively isolate the website from the rest of the web.
right...
I really hope that the Sun (and daily mail) takes up this idea, just think how much nicer the internet would be with the racist, right wing bile that's shat out of their paper every single day.
For a few simple reasons
1) slashdot readers do not represent the general populous. This makes all remarks here invalid.
2) The general populous - used to paying for everything will - pay to access online news. They do not want to have to search for news, they want it there when they logon.
3) there is a generation growing up that has the internet as a standard form of media. not all of them like searching for news either. at 2 quid a week, or 3 a month, or 5 a year, they'll pay. its easier.
scale that to the growing world population, and the cheapness of online publication, this'll work.
Wait! Whats a sig?
It's true that good content needs to be paid for, and that people are prepared to pay for good content, but The Times isn't it. The FT and the Economist have plenty of paying subscribers, but for many it is crucial to their work hence provides a tangible ROI. I cannot see a propaganda sheet, disguised as a generic newspaper, being something worth paying for over all the free quality alternatives.
There will be people that take up the service, an older generation that have been stuck in a rut reading The Times for a decade and unwilling to make the switch, and they may consider this small percentage as an encouraging success. However, this will not grow as all the other papers poach today's more fickle readers to grow their own ad revenue.
A micro-payment service like Flattr would work much better. If a paper has a quality or provocative journalist, like Jeremy Clarkson, I would happily put them on my list. If he is the only benefit but I would have to take out a site-wide subscription, it would be cheaper to buy his book. For now it appears advertising will be the principle revenue generator, and that isn't being fully exploited yet. For instance, I notice there are no Google-style search ads when I do a keyword search in the Guardian. Does their RSS feed have ads? Much as I hate ads, Google have shown us how it can be done without being as annoying yet still provide plenty of revenue. They should learn from successes such as Google, not failures like Salon.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
But let's get serious folks, the politicians love that newspapers are failing. Less serious investigative journalism, less scrutiny, fewer FOI requests etc. but what about bloggers, you ask? Bloggers only write about what they find on the web, how many of them are pounding the pavement? eavesdropping in bars? cultivating the next 'Deep Throat' source? You like your job and your pay check, journalists like their pay check too. Unless you are going to your boss on Monday and say 'all our products and services should be free and I'll work for free too' then be prepared to pay. BTW: this announcement is no surprise. Last year he gave a speech on this topic. Then NY Times announced pay-only access would start in 2011. They allowed plenty of time for other competitors to also announce similar plans. If no-one else followed then they could drop the idea. Similar to how US airlines collude when they announce fee and increases. So subscribe and support the press! or at least click the banner ads when you see something interesting.
The sooner Murdoch makes ALL his media pay per view, the better.
I for one welcome the eventual disappearance of that rancid old goat and his spawn!
But Janes offers so much more.
Those casino derivative gambling so called banks got bailed out, for trillions, and it is still ongoing with them being able to hit huge fed loans at bupkis, and carry trade those loans into bonds and notes paying something..the something backed by the tax payers. There's no free market there or the bulk of them would have gone totally bust, with their alleged assets going for what they are really worth, somewhere between zero and..a penny, whatever their office furniture and computers would go for at the sheriff's auction. It's the biggest non free and totally rigged and scam "market" ever created. Privatized profits and socialized risks. The bulk of derivatives are useless, just some way to scam money out of the system. They make patent trolls look like philanthropists.
But his outlet that's doing that is The Sun (circ. ~2.9 million), not The Times (circ. ~600 thousand). You will note that he's not messing with his best-selling daily title, he's messing with his worst-selling daily title.
And if they were to try charging for www.page3.com (showcase of The Sun's page 3 tit shots, NSFW in the US), there would be an uproar.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article7076987.ece
- From the Horses Mouth, as it were - International Subs are (at $2/€1.5 a day or $4/€3 for the week) slightly more expensive than UK.
That Murdoch is indeed a Horses Ass is a given, I will miss the Times tho, had a good comments section. Speaking of which, check them out on that article - The natives are restless and I know for a fact they are not publishing at least 75% of the complaints either (comments are moderated).
The problem for The Times Online as I see it, most of the online readers are ex-pats who are extremely unlikely to subscribe to a UK paper for the sake of flicking through the Headlines 10-45 minutes a week and having the odd moan about the state of the country on comments.
Sad day, but it was inevitable Murdoch would try this, even if no-one else will - as to extending the paywalls, if anyone whatsoever is prepared to undertake pay subscribtion to his UK toilet rolls (Sun, News of The World..), I would be incredibly surprised indeed.
Good news for The Guardian Online tho ;-)
Absolute idiots. News is free.....duhhhhhh
Does anyone know if subscribers will see ads when viewing articles? (or not just articles, but anywhere on the site?)
As SmallFurryCreature said up top: "When you take a newspaper subscription, you read it like a book. But when you browse the net, you go here you go there" which I agree with.
And this makes me feel like if I'm subscribing to read an article or two from a site, I *really* don't want to be bothered with anything else.
While I like getting stuff for free as much as anyone, I hope that this experiment in getting people to pay for content succeeds, because I think that having all content online (except for porn) free with advertising is too constraining. It costs real money to collect and report news, and if there is no real revenue stream the whole thing breaks down. And while I am a strong supporter of citizen journalism, and am in awe of the amazing coverage that people can generate around causes that make them passionate, I believe that there should also be full time, professional journalists and photographers covering news stories, which means that there needs to be some revenue stream associated with providing news.
That being said, I think that it's almost impossible for content distributors to individually charge for access to content, because it induces too much friction into the process. Specifically, people get content from many places, and it is inefficient for them to maintain a business relationship (with payment info, terms, etc.) individually for every content distributor. For example, I read a dozen web sites regularly (XKCD, Slashdot, daikykos, ...) and I do not want to deal with the hassle of setting up accounts, billing, etc., for all of them. But if I could set up one account that could then send money to support the sites that I go to, I would not mind paying for that. Given that I already have a financial relationship with my ISP, and my ISP knows (theoretically) where I go online, I wouldn't mind having my ISP take, say, $1/month and send it to the web sites that I frequent. If you add up $1/month for everyone online, that would be a nice revenue stream to support sites, without the sites having to set up pay-walls, force people to register, etc., and by keeping the cost low and simple, it would encourage everyone to participate.
Admittedly this would require ISPs to collect money and give it away, but it could be a competitive advantage, in that web sites would encourage people to use ISPs that support them, and I would hope that people would go out of their way to use ISPs that support the web sites that they like.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Another factor is the quality of reporting. The average user is less seemingly less inclined towards quality and will take anything they read at face value. They are also less discerning. I don't think the bulk of readers want honest to god reporting with research to back it up - they just want to see the funny kitty spin on cuteoverload.com, or youtube.
Take a look at CNN's website - they are changing it to show whats most popular, and hide much of the serious news reporting deeper in the site. Articles on CNN often seem to have been rattled off rather quickly, often with typos etc. The focus seems more on getting viewer attention now than on relating anything newsworthy, although admittedly they do at least cover major issues somewhat.
The Guardian is definitely my paper of choice, even though I am in Canada and not the UK. Their website is terrific generally, but I am not sure they can keep up the quality. All that journalistic integrity has got to cost them a lot of money - and the audience who is willing to pay for that is dwindling with each generation.
The problem with most "news" on the web is that a lot of it not backed by solid painstaking research, its rattled off as quickly as possible and a lot more of it is editorialized rather than objective reporting. The same thing is happening with TV news, so much of it is now involving the anchors commenting on the stories and presented in a slanted manner. I can't believe that something like FOX is even on the air, let alone has a viewership.
Plus we are seeing more "from the blogs" type stuff everywhere and I am sorry but the average blog offers opinions, not researched articles. Most barely qualifies as anything remotely resembling journalism. Most of it is editorials intended to reflect a viewpoint. Its not journalism as we knew it - but I think thats going to be a thing of the past in a decade. We won't get news - we will get media-shaped targetted editorials intended to affect our political views, voting habits, and consumer purchasing - we will just think its the news.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Self-inflicted.
I wonder what their on-line advertisers think of this?
With all due respect I think you're either naive, a troll, or working for The Guardian. Every paper has their bias. People just choose to read papers (and other media sources) that are closest to their biases. Newspapers make summaries of the news in the world therefore they make choices about what to present therefore a bias will be present as it is people, not some fantastic purely objective machine, making those selections. There are no objective selections.
A wiser approach is to understand that all news is biased and take into account the specific bias of the resource you're using, perhaps triangulate with other resources (i.e. read a couple of different papers).
But, it goes against the idea of the content neutrality. Essentially, I would like, if I subscribed to FIOS, to have a preferred site package where I could go to any site I wanted, for sure, but those sites with paywalls would get a cut just as cable does today. I think this would be awesome. If they had like a conservative pack, a liberal pack, then I think it would be better for everyone.
This is my sig.
then I wouldn't be thrilled, but I'd be glad to pay. I often pay (donate) for my NPR content because I enjoy it and hope they can continue to produce it. And because they ask. I'm not sure that model goes with the general philosophy of for-profit organizations, but they might have better luck asking nicely than they can expect to if they force it. The fact of the matter is that news takes resources to collect, analyze, and distribute, and I have no reservations about helping to make it possible.
The thing about the internet is that you don't have to sell what you make. Monetising the web isn't just about selling the digital content you create, that's too simple and quite frankly, outdated. If you have a news site that has a lot of readers, you can sell other things that people are prepared to pay for. It's obvious that Google's main product is search, but no-one has ever paid for it, so how come they're a $120 billion company? Think about it Rupert, think outside the box.
you just make this up stuff up as you go don't you
Yeah, he should have said "Ultra-fucking-wacko conservative editorial board."
Those prices seem cheap enough that people who want to integrate topics into "merged" newsfeeds (e.g. Science Daily or PhysOrg) will have no problem paying the price and extracting what little information the "news" source provides. Of course since all the "news" in science generally comes out either via university press releases or journal article abstracts (or increasingly open source journal articles, e.g. PLoS, sometimes PNAS, etc.) there is little value added one can find from public papers. It would appear that public papers would seem to be relegated into dealing with either local news, some increasingly rare investigative journalism or editorial pieces by informed writers. Ultimately the papers have to deal with "fair use" particularly if the repackagers are integrating from multiple sources.
one thing I've never understood: if the newspapers wanted us to pay, would be they willing to provide advertising free news in exchange for paid access? I don't think so.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
I know I will never pay money just to get a bit of news, which is mostly irrelevant crime stories anyways. Not to mention all the political scandals, celebrity gossip and other trash that I don't need to know, don't want to know, and is usually not my business anyways.
Looks like news stories are about to move into the realm of piracy. Seriously if Murdock is going to ransom information, I'm just going to steal it. The only people this is going to hurt are the non-tech savvy folks who are just learning that they can find the truth about anything online, so Murdock can keep them in the dark and feed some fox news to them.
Heck, I'd gladly pay money to keep it from showing up in my search results.
Now, now, don't give him any ideas.
Their main newspaper in the UK is the Sun. It's selling points are bare breasts on page 3, porn stories thinly disguised as "problems" (Dear Deardrie) and football news.
The rest of the paper is taken up with intolerant right-wing propaganda and celebrity gossip.
Most worryingly, though, it is the newspaper whose political leanings decide the result of the UK's General Elections. This time around the Sun has switched back to supporting the Conservatives.
This is the rag the proles get their politics from.
I've never paid for a copy of the Sun, but if I ever look at it (note you can't actually read it) I confine my interest to the bare breasts and the porn stories. I get my news from BBC Radio 4, BBC Mewsnight, Channel 4 News and the Guardian.
The Times is just the Sun but without the breasts and porn stories, i.e. for people who think they are better than that somehow.
Stick Men
Journalism has always been about impressing a point of view to readers, having an axe to grind. Attaining that is a hard and creative (not necessarily affirmative term in this context) work which needs skilled professionals, who need to be paid. Just communicating facts, without nannying readers, is easy and could be automated (press announcements are made by sources who are already paid by their respective organisations). Opinions are created interactively these days, in public forums such as this one. I prefer it this way, as it is essentially with more democratic potential then the old way.
I gave up on them when the site became to bloated with ads, flash and pop ups to read comfortably. My computer just squirms and wiggles in its seat until I relieve it of those pages; then it's happy again. It just wonders back to news.google and finds the same story on a more sane news site.
Yes yes I know. Noscript, NoFlash, etc... etc... But thats just to much work just to read a story.
The problem is that we don't really know what counts as a "reader" to them. If I click to RTFA for one link going to them from another site like Slashdot, do I become a reader? At best, I'm a second-tier viewer who is only going to their site because the the person who posted the article went there, and they might be second-tier viewers to someone else, or a chain of someone-elses that traces back to some primary Times reader that they can maybe expect to get money from. Or maybe that person will just source from some other site.
So I think 5% can be said to be impossible, given that we know very little about the viewing habits of their site. So they have 1.22M daily viewers. Unless they produce a graph that shows over 10% of them read over 20 site pages per day, I have no reason to believe that they're a primary source that will retain readers for the prices they're charging. And I think even that is being generous. Better would be to show that visitors are viewing a lot of Times exclusive content, because even someone who is relying heavily on them today can simply jump ship if the attraction is just republished AP/UPI/etc content. I would assume that any competent newspaper would work out those numbers to exacting detail before even attempting a paywall.
Years ago, I played poker and I found it was much easier to win when you were way ahead of everybody. You could outlast anyone. You can do all sorts of things when the others are at the brink.
I can't believe how these great publishers, billionaires at the top of the social heap, are so dumb that the strongest of them are so anxious to risk it all. Aren't they captains of industry? Don't they want to squeeze out the competition?
I believe that Murdoch and the NY Times (which will do this in a few months) will fail miserably and ruin their franchises. In the unlikely event that they succeed, they will just be leading the way for all the little guys, and their industry will be able to resume its slow fade.
What they do isn't worth £1 a day, or £2 a week, to many people. There's too much competition in news. Aggregators didn't invent copying -- newspapers did it first and continue to rewrite each other with abandon. But that does not mean they can be replaced by bloggers. It's too bad.
We the people got held up at government gunpoint to bail them out. It was running 99 to 1 against those casino bank bailouts, yet it still happened. Freaking conjob and extortion, no different from any other mob demanding protection money "or else".
And this alleged healthcare reform is just another variation on a tax payer holdup, going to the same crew of fatcats.
Too bad we don't have a government market to chose from.Supposedly we have "the vote". Ya right, fat lotta good that does. As it is, they have most everyone faked out that voting for completely corrupt and crooked party A or
B, and their picked for you in the media candidates, as the only credible option, and if you vote anything else you are "wasting your vote". The largest mass fakeout and most successful propaganda scam ever. Like voting for the crips or the bloods to rule over you. And then those people *argue* over which is better....
I am hoping the USA goes the way of the USSR, and then we might have some really different states/nations to choose from. As it is now, it is one size fits no one but the top crooks styled government.
Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, physics, and philosophy studying the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. This sensitivity is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.[1] This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behaviour is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.[2] In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.[3] This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.
Chaotic behavior can be observed in many natural systems, such as the weather.[4] Explanation of such behavior may be sought through analysis of a chaotic mathematical model, or through analytical techniques such as recurrence plots and Poincaré maps.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Newsday
Newsday Gets 35 Subscriptions To Pay Web Site
Sig this!
It isn't so much the amount involved, which is the same as buying the dead tree version, it is the fact that it is quicker to find another newspaper on the internet than it is to find your credit card and type all the details in, whereas in a newsagent, it is pretty easy to find a pound coin in your pocket and hand it over.
Only a fraction of a paper's content covers widely-reported current events. Instead, much of a paper's most interesting material consists of original investigations of issues, as well as analysis and opinion pieces, neither of which can be found in another paper (except through syndication). The critical question is what fraction of people will pay to keep reading these, rather than choosing to find some other but different source of brain food.
What has triggered this crisis is not just the huge reduction in the cost of publishing and distribution that the Web has wrought, which has greatly increased competition in the market for information, but also the better ways product makers now have to get their message out — their own websites and through search marketing — which along with a viscous cycle of advertising overexposure is permanently sickening the display advertising industry, of which newspapers are a part.
One solution is for the papers to earn income directly from help they give their readers, rather than by giving over a large chunk of their readers' experience to flashing lights.
Charging a pound a day to read news is ill-advised. It will transform this man's newspaper from being the anchor media of the community to being just another website for the rich and their wack-job worshipers.
This is Rupert Murdoch we're talking about. I mean, that's what he's done with TV news over here in the US, you know.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It can take its own sweet time to correct itself, but you sure don't want to be standing in the way when it does.
Why is this acceptable, especially when the people most affected by the market "correcting" itself are rarely the ones who had the most influence over the problem in the first place? Why should only risk be socialized but not profit?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'll complain as much as the next man when my favourite sites have paywalls erected, but surely news is worth SOMETHING?
:) There is a cost to having journalists and editors and bandwidth and...
News flash: A majority of people online whine and bitch every time they have to pay a cent! No matter what they get, they are always wanting it for free! I have friends who complain bitterly about the price of the iTunes store, almost all songs are between $1.79 and 2.39 NZD, probably the cost of a large bottle of Coke say. "oh, if it were 20 cents a song, THEN I'd buy...", thats right, until the music is priced at some useless amount, they "refuse to pay that exorbitant fee" ! Bittorrenting/Rapidsharing (heh) everything that was ever produced.
I say, C'mon! A couple bucks for a song is chump change! What does "1.79" buy you anyway?
I dont see myself lining up to pay for news - shouldnt advertising take care of that sort of thing? -, but if a company wants to charge you "$1" for access, who are you to complain? By all means, feel free to start your own news company offering access for "99c"
I support many free sites, I love contributing to Wikipedia and cant see myself "buying an encyclopedia", but there is a cost to producing material, online or in dead tree form, so why complain about giving some of your change to pay for an everlasting good? (a song cant be emptied like a bottle of Coke)
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People think that the Sun determines the winner of UK Parliamentary Elections. This is because the Sun always supports the winner. This is because the Sun's readers helpfully write, text, email and call the Sun's editorial desk and allow the paper to easily gauge the mood of the country whereby it changes its political colours to suit. The Scottish edition managed to support the Conservatives, the Nationalists and the Socialists in the space of twelve months.
News Internationals wacky venture into paywalls is the sort of thing we can expect from a company that does not understand the internet. News International has been so succesful in the past because the competition has always been so weak and stuck in their ways.
The Internet is an exceptionally strong threat to News International because it challenges it in all of its market sectors. It is quite likely that the web is a much greater threat to NI than any of their suits can either appreciate or convince the CEO.
For all the other reasons this is a stupid idea, see my other posts on this subject. I wouldn't want to be duping...
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
I sure as hell am not going to miss anything published by Rupert Murdoch.
Seriously though, It seems like he is hell bent on destroying all of his web properties...
It should be a lesson to others not to do the same thing. Advertising based web publishing works fine. This is just greed rearing it's ugly head, driven by one of the greediest and richest men on earth. He can easily take the fall, and put the terrible idea of a web divided by hundreds of individual paywalls back to bed. The only people wh want a change like that are publishers, and there are plenty of others willing to do it under the current system even if they jerks do go hide behind these paywalls while they wither and die. Good riddance to any websites that think they're so special that people should pay to read what they post.
They aren't newspapers
A web site is not a newspaper either.
and as such have no bearing on the discussion at hand
I was trying to draw an analogy from one paywalled periodical, namely this newspaper, to other well-known paywalled periodicals, namely scholarly journals. What is the essential difference that tells them apart?
Yeah, in the UK it's the Sun that sells like crazy. But Sun readers as a market segment... they're less interested in up-to-the-minute news than they are a pair of bare boobies on Page Three. His satellite channel, Sky, was quite popular too, although I think that may be on the wane ... but again, I can't see a lot of synergy there. Sky has a wider appeal, but on the whole it's the same basic demographic as the Sun readership: blue collar, male, tending toward the political right. I don't think there's a lot of synergy there.
You know, I really don't think he has. I there's a bit of magical thinking at work here. Don't get me wrong, the move is going to have the best tactical support that money can buy. But the strategy is, I think, basically flawed.
Rupert's problem, at heart, is the same problem as the one facing the RIAA. He's made a shitload of money distributing information. The problem he's coming up against now he thinks he's selling news, but what his customers have been paying him to do is distribute the news. And the Internet brings distribution costs way, way down, and simultaneously lowers the barrier to entry to anyone who wants their own news service.
So suddenly Rupert's getting his ass kicked. Not by another paper, which he could understand, but by the Internet. Now no one who wants to keep their job is going to tell him "sorry guv, you're a media baron in a dinosaur medium". So they tell him that it's all Google's fault, and the BBC's fault, and that, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, paywalls really will work, if its done just right and if everyone holds their breath and wishes really, really hard.
Magical thinking. It's not that Murdoch's stupid. It's just that there are no viable, rational strategies and so he's going for the most plausible irrational one.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
You can't charge for the Web. The experience that most users get sucks. They are in IE on a PC and it sucks. There are too many other sources that also suck to bother paying, with very rare exception.
They should be making non-Web content to charge for. For example, iPad apps, or eBooks, and so on. And advertise that on your Web site.
Think of a Sunday newspaper with a magazine in it. Make the newspaper free (Web), charge a low price for the magazine (eBook). Make the part you pay for downloadable and rich in photos and videos and audio. Make the Web compete with that.
The reason HBO worked was it was something née and different from free ad-supported TV. They didn't try to take NBC to a paid model.
When Salon.com paywalled they didn't deny free access to the entire website. They just make it quite annoying to access for the people who didn't pay. Salon.com is still around and occasionally interesting. Especially when they can get Camille Paglia to do a column. They seem to have a lot of people on staff that do little more than come up with new ways to annoy their web site viewers. But they were the first people to tell me about MP3 files twelve years ago, so I'm eternally grateful to them for that.
The worst paywalls are the video clips that make you wait through a 30 second to one minute commercial before they will show what you clicked on. I just jump out of these situations because I hate commercials and I have seen too many already in my life.
The ugliest website that I have ever seen is Asia Times (www.atimes.com). Good content is buried somewhere deep in all this mess. Ebay is getting to be quite ugly too, as is Yahoo!. I'm switching my main e-main address to Google mail so that I don't have to wait for all the schmaltz useless photos on Yahoo that clog my dial-up bandwidth.
I wouldn't mind at all paying the BBC (I live outside the UK) up to $50/year for access.
Why? Because I respect them, and they have tons of content all over their site I often want to view. In other words, they offer good journalism and content, unlike Murdoch and other newspapers where I only ever would read one article now and then, and only because it was linked to from an oft-used aggregate site like /.
However, like others have said, if I had to pay *more than one* subscription, suddenly it's too expensive. So this whole plan fails from the start, unless perhaps it's like $5 per year per site, then I can subscribe to a handful.
Thing is, Murdoch complains that the BBC's out there are ruining his business model, but they were *already there* when he started his online business. That was always the landscape and he knew it. He's a nasty hypocrite and he can go choke on it.
Murdoch always knew he was competing with Free. Maybe he's just not as smart as Google, Facebook, etc. who have managed to make money out of Free. If Murdoch is competing for the advertising dollar, then maybe he's competing more with THEM than with the BBCs of the world. Not because Google "steals news", but because they're stealing his *advertising clients*.
Online newspapers can't deliver targeted ads based even on reader demographics, let alone buying habits, browsing habits, email & feed keywords of them and their social circle, etc. So who are *advertisers* going to go for? Google & Facebook or traditional no-specific-audience newspaper sites?
Economists don't really study chaos, as most economics courses never go beyond linear equations - and you can't get chaotic behavior from a linear system.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Another consequence of global warming....or Amazon rain forest depletion.....or whaling.......or homophobia ......or child abuse by the clergy.....or maybe it is not because of all those things but all the people who believe those things that we have to charge for 'news' again. Something that is worthless is only valued by the worthless....
he will find that he will get a cricket bat to the face if he tries it in the UK, Australia, New Zealand or any other country that is more sensibly governed that the US.
I am hoping this will cause his whole media empire to crash and burn. That way we won't have to put up with his demeted, corrupt, senile twist on the news.