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UK Newspaper Websites To Become Nearly Invisible
smooth wombat writes "Various websites have tried to make readers pay for access to select parts of their sites. Now, in a bid to counter what he claims is theft of his material, Rupert Murdoch's Times and Sunday Times sites will become essentially invisible to web users. Except for their home pages, no stories will show up on Google. Starting in late June, Google and other search engines will be prevented from indexing and linking to stories. Registered users will still get free access until the cut off date."
Exactly. Nobody pays for single academic papers online at the publisher (well, maybe a few idiots I guess).
Well slap my rump and call me a nobody idiot. Actually, there are many journals we don't use enough to justify an annual institutional subscription. I might need 5-10 papers a year from a journal. Subscription cost might be $10,000. Price for 10 individual papers might be $300 or so at most. It often makes more sense to buy individual articles.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Actually I'd say it's more like those membership stores like Costco that make you pay a fee for the privilege of shopping there.
It's admittedly successful, but that's only because there are certain people that while a relatively small percentage of the total population, can be relied upon to be so stupid as to not only submit to such treatment but to do it happily and regularly.
Similar business model when it comes to Fox News.
Costco = Fox News?
Worst. Analogy. Ever.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Murdoch already runs his newspapers as a boutique business and gets his money from elsewhere. Think of all his other media outlets, listen to the message he's spreading about all of us on the net being pirates and thieves and look at how governments are reacting (eg. drastic cuts to BBC news and BBC web presence). His hysterical screaming travelling roadshow on this issue for the past three years has not been for our benefit, it has been for the benefit of gullible or easily influenced governments and regulatory bodies around the world.
He's not an out of touch dinosaur, he owned an internet service provider in 1993 FFS and he's based his entire career on being surrounded by experts that can find an advantage for him in any deal. He understands the net more than many readers here - the problem is he doesn't care if he ruins it for everyone else if he can make a buck out of it.
There are very good alternatives. ... why would anyone miss one option? I think he may do even worse than you suggest... I certainly agree that he has no chance of retaining 10% of his current visitors.
www.guardian.co.uk
www.dailymail.co.uk
and of course news.bbc.co.uk
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I'm a developer for The Guardian ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/ ) - a UK newspaper not owned by Murdoch, which doesn't have any intention of becoming invisible any time soon - rather than erecting a paywall, we've spent the last year putting together a content API that allows anyone to explore our content using search terms, faceting, etc - and then build your own application upon it. Check it out here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform/getting-started
The implementation, written in Scala and based on Apache Solr/Lucene stack was pretty good fun (we plan to opensource it within a few months) - slides with some of the implementation details are here :
http://www.slideshare.net/openplatform/the-guardian-open-platform-content-api-implementation
Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian, recently gave a pretty deep lecture on the 'open vs closed' & 'authority vs involvement' questions raised by the spectre of paywalls:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/25/cudlipp-lecture-alan-rusbridger
cheers,
Roberto
(views my own, not necessarily those of my employer, yack yack yack)
The Daily Mail is *not* a good alternative. It's another hate-filled shitrag of bigotry and clashing themes ("We pay too much to live here, so we need to hire cheap labour" vs "oh no, not immigrants", for example)
I'd agree that the other two are good sources of news, but the Mail? Fuck, they still whine on about conspiracy theories for killing the Princess of Wales. And it still sells papers.
Relying on the Daily Mail for news is like relying on Fox News for level-headed commentary.
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
Murdoch knows EXACTLY how the new technologies work. At least at a high-level. He doesn't need to know the detailed tech:
1 - Google indexes content
2 - Google links to content that is has indexed
Your statement " Half the time I don't even realise which site I'm reading the news on" is exactly the problem the newspapers have right now. It's not going away either. News is a commodity. Unless it's a local story, editorial or some sort of investigative reporting the news is the same across ALL papers. Hell, I work for a newspaper. Everyone pulls in news from the wire services. How many times has google sent you to jrandom midwest paper about a hot topic only to realize that the story was sourced from AP or Reuters? I can go to 20 other sites and get the EXACT same story.
He knows how it works, he just doesn't LIKE it. As someone else said, newspapers have been double-dipping for the lifetime of the product. Selling subscriptions on the front side and ads on the back. The problem is that people are willing to accept ad-supported content online in exchange for free access but I'll be damned if I'm going to patronize a web site that continues to show me ads AFTER I've become a subscriber. That attitude is simply counter to how newspapers operate. Look at the demographics of newspaper subscribers these days. The largest population of subscribers are literally DYING (something like 40% of the subscriber base is over the age of 60).
The only people who really like the current crop of offerings for print-to-ipad conversions are, surprise, newspapermen. We had a big meeting with our editor a few weeks back and he was going ON and ON about how amazing it was to read his old hometown paper on the iPad because it was just like the paper he could get there (ads and all). Seriously?
One reason the WSJ actually works as a paywall is that they have specialized content and analysis but that won't fly for the majority of print outlets making the jump.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"