Slashdot Mirror
Murdoch's UK Paywall a Miserable Failure
David Gerard writes "As part of his war against free, Rupert Murdoch put the Times and Sunday Times of London behind a paywall. Michael Wolff of Newser asks how that's working out for him. You can guess: miserable failure: 'Not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself — who have free access to the site — are not going beyond the registration page. It's an empty world.' Not that this wasn't entirely predictable." Update: 07/17 01:41 GMT by T : Frequent contributor Peter Wayner writes skeptically that the Newsday numbers should be looked at with a grain of salt: "I believe they were charging $30/month for the electronic edition and $25/month for the dead tree edition which also offered free access to the electronic edition. In essence, you had to pay an extra $5 to avoid getting your lawn littered with paper. The dead tree edition gets much better ad rates and so it is worth pushing. It's a mistake to see the raw numbers and assume that the paywall failed."
This experiment has been tried over the last few decades (ever since the papers discovered the commercial Internet) and has failed miserably every time. Some magazines/papers even closed their doors after they tried it because they invested too much money in something that had 0 return on investment and alienated their existing audience that was actually paying their bills.
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[Nelson Muntz]
This is being presented as a fact, but its merely a oppinion based on insider information. No where it states any real numbers. Dont get me wrong, I dont agree with Murdoch's ways but that doesnt warrant factless bashing.
The Times / Sunday Times used to have a paid archive on CD-ROM circa 1992. On the internet, there were no articles over about a week old IIRC, the articles went into those CD-ROM archives. There was no great demand for that either, so the whole concept of charging got ditched and they got advertisers to relaunch a free expanded website.
I wonder that now that it's a paid for website, how the advertisers feel about the massive drop in people being able to view their ads (assuming you're not crunching the ads with plug-ins for the likes of Firefox).
Take Nobody's Word For It.
In other news - water is (usually) wet, deserts are (usually) dry, and The TaxMan Cometh!
The world is FULL of idiots.
Even rich ones.
Lemme give the man a (free, even) clue: On the one side, he wants to *get paid* for all the Free News his "papers" are putting onto "the web". On the other hand he completely ignores all the FREE EYEBALLS that search engines like Google bring to his website.
While incessantly whining about people who 'want something for nothing', what he actually does is treat "free eyeball traffic" as being "worth nothing". Small Wonder His Website No Longer Gets Eyeballs.
Murdock: HEY GOOGLE, STOP SENDING EYEBALLS TO MY WEBSITE without paying me for my content
Google: You had me at "stop sending eyeballs to my website" - all you had to do was ask.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Oh, maaaan, Slashdot, this is so, so, wrong. Lookit:
Michael Wolff was paid a huge sum to write a bio of Murdoch a few years back, "The Man Who Owns the News." It ended up becoming the "Heaven's Gate" of publishing: Wolff was paid a million dollars in advance, and it sold horribly. As a result, Wolff became a pariah amongst publishers, and he has had a jones against Murdoch ever since. He started "Newser" -- an online news aggregation site, sort of a Drudge Report, but with pictures and short summaries written by semi-literate snarky hipster interns -- specifically as a response to the "old-fashioned" way that Murdoch did business. Wolff writes a column there daily; like, every third or fourth one is some screed, equal parts vitriolic and smug, predicting failure for everything Murdoch is involved with. If Murdoch issued a statement saying that "Gravity is a Good Thing," Wolff would find some way to either argue against it or poke fun at it.
Of course, it doesn't make matters any better that Wolff had an affair with one of those aforementioned interns a few years back that was made public -- and kept public, arguably far longer than an extra-marital affair involving a "C"-level journalist should have been -- by the Murdoch-owned NY Post. Wolff's wife (a divorce lawyer!! (he's obviously not the sharpest pen in the inkwell)) left him and took him to the cleaners.
Nobody who knows anything about Murdoch or NYC journalism takes anything Wolff has to say seriously when he's in "Murdoch mode." Kind of like asking the Sheriff of Nottingham to give a measured opinion about that guy "Robin Hood."
Here's the calculation: All of the BBC's content (TV,radio,news): £145.50 pa The Times and Sunday Times: £104 pa On a free market basis Rupees business model doesn't work. But business model inclues political interference in the financing of the BBC, on the basis that its competition is unfair. _On the contrary_. We in the UK pay for the BBC willingly because it is worth the price, and we don't for the Times because it's, well, who cares? The WSJ, FT and Economist are worth paying for to the folks in those industries. The Times is just some more crap from a Murdoch company.
Lower prices would help, but that doesn't explain why the subscribers that get free access weren't going in their either. It's easy to say the price is too high, but when the people that have free access aren't using it either, you have to think that it's something else that's going on.
If its one thing I've learned in a few years of being involved in the journalistic trade...it's that so many people in it are pigheaded to the point of doing themselves a lot of damage to their potential success and reputation. This is true from editors, to rank and file columnists...and new graduates convert alarmingly to this mentality with a dissapointing number of exceptions.
Murdoch aside, the overriding truth of modern journalist both here in the UK and in the US is that quantity rules over quality. That's why every Saturday and Sunday we Britons cannot buy a 'quality broadsheet' without having to acquire a book's worth of text in supplements along with the actual newspaper itself. That one has to shell over £1.20 or so for a compendium of tripe that you mostly won't get around to reading is why journalism is failing.
Simply put there are too many people employed who may have begun with some talent, but have lapsed into a state of passive drudgery writing filler columns about inane topics most readers could not care less about. You can actually tell with a lot of them that the author wasn't really thinking as he or she typed it out. In short the 'news' of newspaper is absent in a woefully high proportion; yes there's room for editorials and quirky opinion pieces...but the proportions are way off right now.
This is true of all Murdoch rags, most starkly The Times which was a pioneer of supplements in the 1990s. Once, decades ago (pre-Murdoch), the Times led some of the most intriguing investigative departments in journalistic history - they spent months to break a story that would spread across what? Four pages or so of print? This level of work for that amount of journalism is unheard of today - that's because today it's all about cheap, easy stories that can be summed up mostly as: 'Churnalism' (a term coined by Guardian journo Nick Davies) . It began in earnest in the 1980s with Andrew Neil's Times, and the trend away from reportage which took effort, talent, dedication and downright brilliance to pull off is almost entirely absent in The Times of 2010.
There is hope for the profession, as wracked by disease as it is; online journalism has some good offerings where journalists actually leave the office and do some old school reporting. That Murdoch and a few others see their awful, soulless content as worthy of paying for online rather than just going for what's worked since the beginning (advertisements) is telling of their wrongheaded approach which led so many publications to become so degraded in quality.
Murdoch's not stupid, even if he does want to fight the tide. The question is, does he genuinely want to get money from this venture or does he want a "failure" to demonstrate the need for the government (who are indebted to him for supporting them in the election and stabbing the previous governing party in the back) to lend him a hand. I think it's quite reasonable to assume that he was advised that this would be a commercial failure and decided, eyes open, that that was exactly what he wanted to advance his lobbying position.
I am a subscriber to the Times Literary Supplement. This year, I paid the supplementary 20$ to get Internet access, since I live in Canada and get the TLS with a substantial delay, and also because I was just curious given the scale of Murdoch's experiment, not talking about the scale of his pretensions.
So I am one of the very few who got past the registration page. The other side of this pay-wall allows us a peek on the dystopian nightmare that would have been the Internet if developed by corporations, and it is on a par with the current state of academic journals online. In order to undo what the Internet is meant to do, that is to hyperlink, Murdoch has spent a fortune developing a shiny interface that let us navigate through an exact reproduction of the paper thing. It is DRM by design: there is no way to copy and paste, to store, therefore to link, to annotate or to use in any meaningful sense of the word beyond a reading experience that is, as a result, as uncomfortable as it gets. The technical constraints that all this restraining impose make navigating and reading impractical and painful.
Despite the attractiveness of reading the TLS in a timely manner, I went to the site once and never repeated the experience.
I'm also wondering what people would consider something they'd pay for.
Off the top of my head:
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Consumer Reports is another periodical website that uses the subscription model (though in that case it is because they don't accept advertising so their reviews can be truly independent). What they have in common with WSJ, Economist and various scientific/medical journals is that they offer highly specialized data to a niche market that is willing to pay a premium for it. General interest newspapers and magazines do not fall into that category which is why the advertising-based model works much better for them.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
That means:
1. NO ADVERTISING. If you advertise, particularly the annoying, video and sound (with those extra annoying pop-up - or worse pop-out crap), your customers are the advertisers and my attention is what you are selling. Why should I have to pay you so that you can IRRITATE and ANNOY me by selling MY attention? NO. Adverising is a great, perfectly fine way to pay for FREE content. It is NOT an acceptable way to make some extra money on top of what you charge me.
2. NO TRACKING ME. Again, if I am paying you for a service, that means I don't want you to invade myprivacy. You don't track what I read or when. No record keeping of anything I do. You are allowed to count how many people click on a story, but not whether the same person clicks on story X as also clicks on story Y.
3. Video and sound should all be accompanied by printed summaries. Deaf people (and blind people using text-to speech converter programs) are important customers too and some of us don't like the video - it takes too much time, is lazy, and if I wanted that I would turn on the TV.
4. Better, in depth writing that does not accept stupid statements. Don't just accept statements, VERIFY them. (i.e. treat each of the people you quote the way Politifact.org does and when they give numbers make sure they are telling the truth.) When someone says something really stupid like "this snow storm in the heart of winter disproves global warming", call them on it YOURSELF, don't simply get an opposing point of view.
The Internet did not kill newspaper, a combination of poor writing and advertisers did (the advertisers would rather spend 5 cents to talk sell diapers to pregnant women than 10 cents to sell diapers to everyone). Those same forces rule the internet news market - as long as you let them. If you want to recreate the pay-news market, you need to avoid the problems that killed the newspaper.
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