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."

Comments

And nothing of value is lost

[mlts]

People getting news will find other sources, and the advertising revenue will go to whomever to the competition.

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. If Merdouche doesn't want to offer news for free, he'll be undercut by others who do.

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure they'll change their mind when traffic to their website nosedives and they lose their advertising revenue; by then it may be too late.

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[mlts]

I forgot to list this in my earlier post, but here are the scenarios that will happen with Murdoch delisting his news sites:

1: They get forgotten except by subscribers. Can the news sites make money without ad revenue alone? Can they get by and make profits just on these people? This may cause costs to rise per person to hundreds of dollars a year. If the news site has such a fan base that people would do that, it may work, but people would probably find their news elsewhere. If they are reading from an aggregate like news.google.com, they might not even realize that the Times sites are not present on the list anymore.

2: They become boutique sites like peer reviewed journals. There are a number of academic sites which are pay to play, and cost a hefty fee per PDF article. However, for general news, I don't think people would be interested in this. Maybe for back article research, but not for day to day items.

3: They wise up and start playing ball again. Ad revenue may not be the most money they can get, but compared to no revenue at all, it might be a fruitful decision.

4: They end up in the dust. There are a lot of unemployed journalists, it it wouldn't take much impetus for a startup news site to start up that is lean enough to run on ad revenue, perhaps having additional revenue streams for back article searches. No, this startup news site may not have enough money to pay for an AP wire, but those stories can always be come by other ways.

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[Zocalo]

As I understand it, that's Murdoch's point (or hope, anyway). He's not been able to make enough money off his news sites through advertisement based revenue streams, so now he's going to try and make people pay for the content and make his money that way. That only works if the content is not available for free elsewhere, even if it's only the first paragraph on a news indexer like Google's site as that is all many people would read.

Sure, a lot of people will go elsewhere for their news, but as long as more money comes in from those who are prepared to pay for their content then Murdoch will improve his bottom line, albeit probably by nowhere near the amount he is hoping for. I think we've seen what happens after than with Cable TV; despite paying for the service, you'll start getting more and more adverts anyway because Murdoch is nothing if not a greedy bastard. Unlike with Cable TV however, these adverts will be to logged in and thus trackable users, meaning adverts will be much more targetable and slightly more lucrative to Murdoch.

The scary part is what happens if his model actually works, or at least is better a better source of revenue than the current model? Chances are in that case at least some of the potential alternative news outlets will go the same way and the remaining choices might not exactly be bastions of sound journalism. I suppose there's always the BBC since they are funded by the license fee, but even they appear to have been restricting some overseas access of late to things like iPlayer videos embedded in stories.

Freely available international news coverage is not something that I want to see in the position of being the one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[dintech]

Yeah it's a bit stupid but then dinosaurs always did have small brains.

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[NickFortune]

As I understand it, that's Murdoch's point (or hope, anyway). He's not been able to make enough money off his news sites through advertisement based revenue streams, so now he's going to try and make people pay for the content and make his money that way

I don't believe that. I think he's hoping to lead a newspaper revolution. He wants all newspapers to go paywalled, so he can try and create an artificial scarcity and maintain pre-internet pricing models.

The scary part is what happens if his model actually works, or at least is better a better source of revenue than the current model?

I read somewhere that the Guardian (another UK national paper) reported advertising income from its web site of 40M. If that's true, Murdoch needs upwards of 200,000 weekly subscribers to match that. I can't see that happening. I think people who have that sort of investment in the Times probably take the dead tree edition, and won't want to pay for the information again. He'll get a handful of corporate subscriptions, of course, but even internationally I can't see that equaling lost revenue.

The casual readers, of course, will stay away in droves

Freely available international news coverage is not something that I want to see in the position of being the one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

Isn't going to happen. The trouble with the strategy is that it funnels readers (and therefore ad revenue) to the non-participating papers. The more papers that follow Murdoch's lead, the more profitable it becomes to offer ad-supported news. Even if he's successful beyond all reasonable expectations, there's still going to come an equilibrium point.

Unless he's looking at aggressive takeovers of the dissenting papers, of course. But that's only viable if the number of targets is comparatively small, and I doubt he'll get that many buying into his Master Plan.

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[VendettaMF]

>> He wants all newspapers to go paywalled, so he can try and create an artificial scarcity and maintain pre-internet pricing models.

In essence he wants laws passed and customary behavior established that ensure that no vehicle may travel without at least 2 standard Buggy Whips and a bag of oats aboard.

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[paiute]

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.

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

Or else he'll argue Google is unfairly supporting the competition by indexing their free content. It's pretty clear either way that neither the guy nor any of the people advising him have any idea about the way the new technologies work. Half the time I don't even realise which site I'm reading the news on, I just follow interesting sounding links from Google, and I usually read two or three takes on the story from different sites to ensure I get a more rounded understanding of the real issues, but I rarely go to a specific source site as my first port of call (well, apart from the BBC site). If a bunch of sites disappear from the Google news feed, I probably won't even notice the difference, I certainly won't be tracking them down and paying to subscribe to them (and let's face it, if a user is already coming directly to your site for free news, Google doesn't even enter the equation).

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[delinear]

1-2% when the site has something of particular interest to you. When it's just regurgitating the same stale news as every other site, I can see this being even less. I certainly don't think they'll be able to use the quality of their journalism as a major selling point.

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[Blue Stone]

He will be undercut by others, but he'll also use his business model failure to attack the BBC: "Unfair competition! An honest businessman like me can't make a go of it with the likes of the BBC supplying news, with it's massive and unfair state subsidy! Do something about it Dave [Cameron (UK PM)] or I'll say nasty things about your party in my many, many [still bought, for some reason] print newspapers! Ya Fuckin' bitch! [The PMs of the UK all want to wiggle their bottoms suggestively for Murdoch].

Hopefully, there'll be enough other newspapers who haven't gone down this route of a paywall who will be able to discredit his (IMO) inevitable lies.

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[silentcoder]

>You have a right to news, but you don't have a right to make me pay your bill. Take it out of your own pocket, instead of picking mine.

Typical conservative "didn't read the post" response. I made a very strong argument about why it's SOUND ECONOMIC POLICY to make people subsidize news so everyone can get it. That you GET more than you GIVE when you "pay the bill". In short, I gave a logical argument that you are NOT "paying the bill" but INVESTING the money on a scheme with solid returns. As we share the burden of the investment, so we get to share the benefits of the payout.
But conservatives never figure that out. When a thousand people buy shares in a company - they are paying the companies bills by your logic - and making the CEO rich by raising the share price. But if the company succeeds, they get a massive return on their investment, that's why they do it.
Some things are so valuable, and have such a NEEDED return that we cannot afford the RISK of letting it up to the market, we NEED to make sure it's there EVEN IF IT WON'T MAKE A PROFIT THAT JUSTIFIES THE LEVEL OF INVESTMENT.
Things like public roads - even conservatives generally don't think all roads should be privately run toll roads (only the most extreme of libertarians think that). Why ? Because lots of people being able to get to work easily makes the whole economy stronger, all of them paying toll-fees makes it weaker and makes EVERYONE poorer.
Qualitatively, the gain in the economy from having a road is huge, but smaller than the loss if all roads were toll roads, so it's better to build public roads except in rare cases where the sum on that particular road works out the other way around.

Same thing here - providing news that doesn't cost cash right now, which even an unemployed student can get access to (the people who will be contributing to the economy when you expect it to be growing so your retirement investment doesn't go up in smoke) has massive benefits for society. Denying even one citizen that access can have huge detrimental effects - one vote STILL makes a difference.
Voting right, investing right and knowing when to borrow and when to save - are all things we can ONLY know if we have access to news. The more people have this access, the better the country and the economy is doing - and the benefit of that reaches every member of society.
It's not a subsidy in the long run, it just looks like one if you are as shortsighted as the average American republican. It's an investment.

>You also have a right to a free press, which is not possible when government controls the funds (as is the case with pro-government-leaning PBS). He who holds the funding holds the reins.

That is a false dichotomy. A government funded news source is only detrimental to the availability of a free press if there are laws to prevent competition with it. If private news is available, people who can afford it - will buy it and rightfully expect better quality news.
So the impact on "freedom of the press" is non existent.
Your second statement has nothing to DO with that. That is a DESIRE for unbiassed reporting. Which is stupid because it's impossible. Everybody has bias. The government run news will (usually - there are ways to mitigate this into near non-existence) have a pro-government bias. But the corporate run news will have a corporate bias. Only a faux news believer will imagine that either is unbiassed. The Corporate News will want you to believe that all market regulation is always a bad idea, and suggest that the "hidden hand of the market" (it's not hidden, it's mythological) will somehow prevent things like corporations dumping toxic waste in our drinking water - when history shows that it doesn't.
When there wasn't regulation, they did it. Even after regulation they still do it - but a lot less. Why ? Because the market demands they do it if that's whats cheapest and makes most profit. Because the market's "hand" is extremely shortsighted. We have a thousand corporate scandals a year proving jus

Re:And nothing of value is lost

[icebraining]

You have a right to news, but you don't have a right to make me pay your bill. Take it out of your own pocket, instead of picking mine.

So if I wanted to, I should be able to pay 0 taxes? I should be able to not contribute towards hospitals, roads, schools, fire departments, police, jails, military, public servants, courts?
Would such a system be feasible?

If there's anything on that list that you do believe I should be forced to contribute, why are news different?

A great disturbance in the Force?

[kurokame]

It's as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...but no one cared.

And something of value is gained

[AliasMarlowe]

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.

Re:And something of value is gained

[dintech]

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.

Yeah exactly. If I wanted to pay to be lied to, I'd become a Scientologist.

Google are stealing by adding value?

[Rogerborg]

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.

Re:Google are stealing by adding value?

[mlts]

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.

Re:Invisibility means no readers

[jimicus]

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.

Too much greed

[mangu]

Print news has always been funded primarily by advertising

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.

try a newspaper that has an API, not a paywall...

[robertito]

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)