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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."
The thing is that Murdoch is a genius and a kingmaker. He has shaped the landscape of US and UK politics radically. The guy isn't dumb, and he knows his stuff.
What is happening here is hubris. He scored big on his companies making blockbusters (the movie Avatar helped fill his coffers up, so he isn't lacking for much.) However, he expects people to pay for news articles like they happily pony up money to see a Na'vi kick some corporate enforcer derriere in 3D. This is his mistake.
News aggregation sites will keep on going. They will just not index his news sites' stuff. Going to news.google.com and reading about events is not like going to see a movie. People are not going to pay per article when they can read all day free. And unless the whole Internet is replaced by a walled garden like a Compuserve (which I'm sure a lot of very well heeled people want), it will likely remain this way.
_Some_ people get the whole thing about distribution costs plummeting and the need for new business models. Example: The Guardian.
Others don't. Example: Rupert Murdoch.
For people interested in these matters, I suggest techdirt.com -- I am not affiliated, but I love reading their stuff.
I'm very curious to see whether people will notice the change in news bias if most of the major MSM sites go behind paywalls.
For decades the MSM, which functions essentially as the marketing department of the business/government/media oligarchy, has been western society's way of defining reality.
How might people's view of the world, and their own worlds, change as paywalls muffle that particular voice and allow others to be heard?
If this does lead to of any kind social change, it will be quite beautiful that it was their own unstoppable quest for more money that led the plutocracy over the cliff.
I don't think any (print) newspaper can survive off internet advertising income alone.
The world will simply become more extreme.
And of course...
You could have national newspapers, but with local advertising. But since this is expensive to do (so many different print versions to distribute) they need to automate this.
Note that only 1 business model can survive mostly without advertisers -- the newspapers offering quality information for a high price to a specific subset of readers.
So they might just as well cut themselves off the net and take their chances with their readers. Swim or sink.
The thing is that Murdoch is a genius and a kingmaker. He has shaped the landscape of US and UK politics radically. The guy isn't dumb, and he knows his stuff.
Thats why all the time he never wanted google to stop indexing his pages. He rather wanted Google et al. to pony up some dough for the privilege of advertising his newspapers....
bickerdyke
People generally only visit these academic sites if they can claim the cost on expenses from their employer. There isn't anything in the Times that people need in order to do their job in the way that there is for the Financial Times, the Economist or the Wall Street Journal. I read somewhere that they need to get about 10% of their current readers to subscribe to replace the lost ad revenue. I don't think subscription numbers will be anything like that high.
Same as the media industry in general. Radio and TV used to be funded primarily by advertising.
Those were relatively low revenue businesses, after all no one cared to pay too much for a newspaper they throw away at the end of the day, and no one cared to pay to listen to the radio or watch TV. It's different from buying a car or clothes or any other durable item that you would use for years.
Then pure unadulterated greed came in. Now they want to charge us for every image we see, for every sound we hear. They want to put meters in our eyes and ears. I say fuck them.
Let them go broke if advertising doesn't pay enough. Let other investors come in, investors who are smart enough to know they cannot charge more than people are ready to pay.
People are willing to pay for the paper edition because it gives them several benefits over the same content on a website edition. The biggest is convenience: you can take the content with you and read it where ever you happen to be.
You've made some good points, but I'd offer the following: I continue to subscribe to newspapers, periodicals and magazines for a number of reasons, none of which include convenience.
It's certainly possible that a Kindle-like device may revolutionise reading in general, and the newspaper/magazine industry specifically (publishers are certainly hoping it does). But until that happens, I'll continue to pay for print subscriptions .. and bemoan the downward spiral of things.
Whoa whoa whoa there, bucko. Don't accuse "NewsCorp" of reporting the news! Allow them to be what they want to be -- a shill for the opinions of one megalomaniac named Rupert.
Well, Not to defend the News Corp decision, because I do disagree with it, but we have to admit, the oldline news services are in a bit of a bind.
They are used to being able to make money both on the front end (Selling newspapers and/or subscriptions) and on the back end (selling ads that are placed in their newspapers or via TV sponsors.) With the rise of the internet, New Media sources are eating into their reader/viewership and thus their bottom line.
The real issue for the old media sources is that many internet news "sources" are simply aggregators of news from other sources, with most of those sources being the old media websites! So the old media has to bear all the traditional costs of running a news outlet (paying for personnel, buildings, IT assets, travel expenses, benefits packages, etc.) but are losing revenue to new media outlets that have either none, or significantly less of those same cost outlays, because they are often a single person running a website, or a small staff of people working in a small office running a website.
A primary example of this is one of the most most popular new sources on the web, The Drudge Report. Regardless of your personal opinion of Matt Drudge, one must admit that his site is very very popular. Who runs The Drudge Report? Well, pretty much just Matt. (Although he may have some staff now, I don't honestly know for certain.) And what IS The Drudge Report? Mostly just a news aggregator. Yes, it has broken several unique stories over it's lifetime, but it's MOSTLY just an aggregator. There are other sites that operate on similar principles, (/. itself would make another excellent example) and they make up the bulk of the "New Media" market.
So what is a company like News Corp do to? They are losing traditional front-end sales to News Aggregators, and are losing back-end ad sales to Ad blocking technology. If they don't make money they don't survive. So can one REALLY blame them if they decide to go paywall?
Personally, I think that there are better options, such as Partial paywall or better ad delivery that doesn't rely on unsecure 3rd party ad delivery services or more smoothly integrated non-flash ads that are both harder to block and less likely to spur attempts to block.
I'm sure others can come up with even better ideas, but I think we all need to admit that these companies need to be allowed to conduct their business in the way that they see fit without us siting here and just demanding everything for free and expecting them to run on well-wishes and nice thoughts.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Oh, I'm not sure the analysis is that hard. The more I read newspapers, the more I get the feeling they are becoming all the same only with different headers. Less and less is news they've dug up, more and more it's just current events they can do a story on. So it's slightly more than the commentary and reviews and rehashed press releases bloggers can do, sometimes they send people out with cameras and doing interviews but it's something every paper who bothers to check the event calender and has a press card can do. Constant rounds of layoffs confirm this impression, today you don't have have time for anything but "guaranteed" stories.
You can stay on that ride all the way down, but is there money in it? It's very little like journalism and more like AP or Reuters, mass producing stories for next to nothing. That, and the market can simply be oversaturated meaning companies will in the short term sell themselves for below cost rather than fold. Of course the one with the deepest pockets will be left standing but those pockets will be awfully much slimmer before you get there. So he's bailing on a market that he doesn't see a future in, for a market he thinks there might be a future in. If there isn't, I'm sure Murdoch has some infotainment shows on TV he can promote instead so it's not like the bets are that unhedged.
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