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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."
People getting news will find other sources, and the advertising revenue will go to whomever to the competition.
People will be less likely to come across Murdoch tripe on the web. This is a Good Thing, as it should reduce the number of victims of his misinformation.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
This is weapons grade idiocy in action. Murdoch chose to make the material freely available, inviting anyone with a web browser to come and read it. Google merely advertised its existence, to his benefit and ours, hooking up browsers with the content. And simple because Google could find a way to make money from the value they added (to both producer and consumer!) what they are doing is "theft"?
The Murdochs of this word are dinosaurs, moaning in hunger-maddened anger as the forests give way to grassland that they're not equipped to browse on. If dinosaurs had had lawyers, they've had sued the grass for displacing the cycads.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Considering the newspapers News International publishes, I don't really consider this a loss. The less of "The Sun" and "News Of The World" seen on-line the better, really; only the "The Times" and "Sunday Times" could really be considered any kind of a loss.
Now if only we could get "The Daily Mail" to follow suit.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Not necessarily.
Let us assume for the time being that the Times' website is losing money hand over fist. This is a perfectly valid assumption - hell, the print version of the times hasn't made money in years.
In which case, switching to a paid subscription will do a few things:
1. Drastically reduce traffic to the website. This may actually be a good thing because it means all of a sudden the amount of infrastructure (and associated cost) required to host it will plummet.
2. Give a consistent, known amount of revenue per reader. Mr. Murdoch probably only needs a few thousand customers worldwide for it to have been worthwhile - and if he's got any brains at all, he'll have streamlined the operation such that news that is printed is selected and brought into the website in a fairly automatic process which means the site just sits there doing its thing 90% of the time. Considering the amount it costs to buy a UK paper abroad (usually three or four times the cover price, assuming you can find one and it isn't a week old), there may well be enough ex-pats who think that £2/week is a good deal.
Put another way, do you as a /. reader think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot? He's an idiot who is almost certainly worth about a million times what you are, and I guarantee quite a few businesses which put news content on the web will be watching this very closely. If he's right (and I accept it's a big if), he'll turn the website from a loss-leader into a quiet little machine that just sits in the corner ticking over and making a fair bit of money. Once that happens, there won't be a quiet movement of other news sites going pay-as-you-read. There'll be a stampede.
Ever since Google News debuted, I've been trying to figure out a way to block Murdoch's evil media empire content from being shown, just so that I don't accidentally click on any of his links. I'm very glad to see that he's going to do it for me.
I don't consider it a threat, I consider it a gift.
This space available.
If only Fox and CNN can be persuaded to follow suit with their websites, and maybe move their televised channels to a subscription model as well.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
You can read it on the train, you can read it on the lavatory - and if you run out of toilet paper ..... there's something else you can't do with a laptop. You can even line your parrot's cage with it.
What Murdoch is about to find out is that the value people place on the content is quite small, especially when most of it is celebrity gossip, ill-informed and bigoted columnists and rants disguised as stories - written purely to promote the owner's politics. The real value of the newspaper is it's ease of use. Once you take that away the disadvantages of a web-only publication far outweigh the lower price. He will also find out that just because news costs money to gather, script and present doesn't mean that people are willing to pay that cost and that presentation is a much bigger part of the deal.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I don't think that, but I do think it's possible for someone to be smart about some things, and not terribly knowledgeable or understanding of something else. One of the issues the Internet has had since its explosion has been the number of established industries (and successful people associated with those industries) that suddenly found it a threat. These people, from studio bosses to booksellers, weren't idiots, they got where they were by knowing their industries inside out, but how to deal with the free flow of information itself became a particular issue they were ill-equipped to manage.
Murdoch, thus far, has a terrible record with the Internet. While Fox News might have more viewers than CNN or MSNBC, its website is one of the least popular. While Murdoch can't be blamed, given the recentness of the acquisition, for the WSJ's low presence compared to, say, the NYT, the UK situation is staggering with the Guardian's website attracting 37 million unique visitors every month, vs the Time's less than 20M. Try as I may, I can't think of a single online operation primarily managed by Murdoch that's attracted any serious level of serious success compared to its direct rivals.
It's possible Murdoch will turn that around, but it's hard to see how removing your sites from Google and discouraging bloggers from deep linking can help you in the short or long term. Even if the aim is to change every hundred free readers into one paying subscriber and become successful that way, is it probable that this would work? Is the Times of such perceived high quality by a substantial number of people that those people would chose it and chose to pay for it over a high quality free alternative like The Guardian? Can The Times survive if the only people reading it are those who have already heard of it, and haven't gotten into the habit of reading an easier to find quality news website?
Do I think Murdoch "gets" the Internet? No. I suspect News International will, eventually, figure out how to work with it, but it may require an individual who knows more than centralized media to do it. Murdoch, just about, knows centralized media. Even there, his skills tend to be overstated: Murdoch's business plan within centralized media has always been fairly simple: run profitable populist media enterprises (The Sun, Fox, Fox News, etc), and run one or two loss making "serious" journals to ensure he has higher level political clout. Murdoch's skills are with populist, low-end, centralized media. I wouldn't assume he knows how to monetize news on the Internet any more than I'd expect Einstein to run a movie studio.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I guess Merdouche translated from French to English means "enema"?
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