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."
...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.
Murdoch's crap now includes the WSJ. Just sayin....
The SCO lawsuit makes me wish my company were in Utah. We need a new building.
You mean like Wikinews, which already exists or something different like Indymedia or the whole blogosphere?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I don't have a credit card
At least where I live (Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA), banks and credit unions offer VISA or MasterCard debit cards to their checking account customers at no additional charge.
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*
Market fundamentalism is funny.
The worth of something is not handed down from on high by your god, the 'Invisible Hand'. The worth of things cannot always be quantified in monetary terms.
Furthermore, the notion that your mythical 'market' can correctly assign prices seems to have been blown out of the water by the recent failure of that market to correctly price financial derivatives. Which is why mainstream economics doesn't actually take your kind of market-worship seriously anymore.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Here's one newspaper who tried it.
http://www.observer.com/2010/media/after-three-months-only-35-subscriptions-newsdays-web-site
It cost them $4m dollars to set up the paywall. They got 35 subscribers at $5 per week, so it would take 440 years just to recover the cost of setting up the paywall, assuming no transaction charges.
Not anymore (as of August of this year). Unless you allow them to do it, anyway. It's the only good thing to seem to come out of Congress last year, which makes me wonder what's wrong with it.
His news stuff isn't /meant/ to be news. It's meant as entertaining (to draw them in) propaganda (to get them angry at the "right" things).
Unfortunately his target audience is not generally intelligent enough to tell that it's not news.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem