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."
"Sir, there's something wrong with our servers, or else the reporting service. Look here, at the pageviews count. It's stuck at zero."
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!
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.
Lets iterate this hypothesis a bit.
It's 350$ a year if you wish to pay avery day anew, but it's 104$ if you pay every week.
The next step I would implement, will be 50$ if you pay once per month, followed up with 35$ if you pay once per year.
So if you subscribe for a year you get a rebate of 90%. Suddenly this scheme does not look so bad at all.
... whenever a text is transmitted, variation occurs. This is because human beings are careless, fallible, and occasiona
I bet that failblog, once posting Murdoch's photo, will have a higher hit count than the Times.
Unless you consider all of the other sites out there that currently don't charge for their content.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
You mean like Wikinews, which already exists or something different like Indymedia or the whole blogosphere?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
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.
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.
That's the same as the cover price for the physical printed edition. Which is ridiculous- who in their right mind could justify paying the same for online data as they pay for printed/shipped/delivered media?
Surely the costs being lower should mean the price is lower, right?
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*
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 suspect you are missing the point - this is an attack on the BBC. Firstly introduce payment for the Times etc. online. Get that established, then the next step will be to complain to Parliament and the press that the BBC is unfairly competing with his online offering, as it is giving away news that he has to charge for, and therefore the BBC News websites should be shut down. This has been his tactic to date (google for Murdoch, BBC and unfair if you want citations on this). Murdoch cannot stand genuine competition.
If I had mod points....
This is completely true in my view. Murdoch hates the BBC. OK, fine. But he will use political presure to complain about unfair competition in, I reckon, 5 years.
It won't be Rupert Murdoch himself of course. It will be his rottweiller of a son who will get whichever government of the day to reduce the budget and scope of the BBC News website. It's not the beginning of the end but it is the beginning of the beginning of the end if you get my drift.
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.
"But he will use political presure to complain about unfair competition in, I reckon, 5 years."
He's already complained loudly about the BBC and Australia's ABC/SBS "unfair advantage" but nobody is paying any attention to him since fucking with those institutions has always ended badly for politicians that have tried it in the past. It simply won't wash with the public in AU/UK, state sponsered media generally enjoys a much better reputation than the commercial offerings and has been around for well over 50yrs. Given that history it doesn't take a genius to work out that "unfair competition" from the BBC/ABC hasn't stopped him from becoming mega rich in the past.
Sure he's got friends in high places and is a strong influence on government policy in the western world but there are some things even Rupert can't change.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Have you tried to live without a TV in the UK? I did for 6 years. The TV Licensing people refused to believe that I didn't have one and kept pestering me to get a license. One year I had to sign two copies of the "I promise I don't have a TV set" form within a fortnight, speak to them on the phone and to deal with a TV License Inspector who turned up on my doorstep at 6pm one day.
The funny thing is, I became a great BBC Radio 4 fan during that time. It's paid for by the TV License fee, but you don't need such a license to listen to the radio...
It's a funny old world.
Stick Men