Murdoch papers to charge for online viewing,

[DotCommunist]

Does New Scientist even bother to charge for online content anymore?

 

[Hocus Eye.]

I read a lot of online news content. Sometimes, you get to read a paragraph for free but just when it gets interesting you get a link to a page where you have to subscribe and pay.

I don't think that the big name popular newspapers will go very far down this line because it would make it hard for their own journalists. Their journalists get lots of their news while sitting at their desks looking at what is in other newspapers. This is one reason why all the papers have the same stories. (See Flat Earth News for more details)

 

[hipipol]

the WSJ is a bad template - its specialist, most of the subsrcriptions are charged to comapny accounts and it actually proved some proper thought out reporting - none of which condtions apply to the Murdoch stable

The FT was subsription, now most of the interesting stuff can be ganered from their restricted but free parts and some of their spinoffs - alphaville for example.

So if it dont work for the FT I cant see the Scum managing any better!!!

 

[treelover]

QOG
What isn't

broadly speaking, the NI stable of media

 

[trevhagl]

The Guardian reports that all of the N/I stable including The Times is planning to charge for reading its content online: Is this the beginning of 'pay to view' for all online media, will the Guardian follow suit? Tbh, its been great having the ability to scan all newspapers, I would argue it has helped democracy etc, but is it all over now?

I think that would be great. Less people reading evil shite

 

[sim667]

Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, he replied: "We're absolutely looking at that." Taking questions on a conference call with reporters and analysts, he said that moves could begin "within the next 12 months‚" adding: "The current days of the internet will soon be over."

's alright....... i use the independant or the bbc news anyway

Ill miss the TES though, my mum will still get it

 

[skyscraper101]

If that means fewer people get to read the Sun, good.

Exactly. The website is a shower of shite anyway.

I'd pay for an onscreen formatted newspaper it I was using a Kindle, but papers would just lose market and influence if they unilaterally introduced charges just to look at their websites, IMO.

I agree.

Friends Reunited - £7 per year (and it even came first)
Facebook - £0

Friends Reunited was such a spectacular fail, in the sense that it had all the opportunity to be as big as Facebook is now but lost all their market share because of its charging policy. The biggest muppets being ITV who paid £175Million for it Apparently it's worth between £20-£40 million now. I cannot even understand why its even worth that much.

 

[kyser_soze]

Wow, once again the sheer ignorance of U75ers WRT The Sun shines through!!

You're talking about a newspaper that runs at least 10 successful premium rate phone lines, has had paid for downloadable extras like ringtones etc available on the site for ages - of course it's readers will pay for the content if it's sold to them in the right way.

I would suggest everyone on this thread who is going on about free content should have a look at ed's thread in computing about the actual cost of free web services, and how the non-paying model is potentially has a limited run left. Murdo isn't wrong - the funded by advertising model didn't work 10 years ago, and it doesn't work now.

I cannot even understand why its even worth that much.

The membership database...

 

[jayeola]

Murdock is good at business. Free content probably does not make any money or his firm and or is unsustainable. Some one had better tell him that advertising rev may be affected if people around the world cannot see __any__ content. I don't mind a teaser or intro to a full article.

 

[_pH_]

I quite like thelondonpaper actually.

I don't really bother with it, apart from the wonderful Em

 

[Kaka Tim]

I'm struggling to see anybody paying for an online version of the times, and certainly not the Sun. Why bother when you have so many other - and better - online news services?

Thats not being sneery at the sun's readsership - but its strength is not up to the minute news and analysis - which is what you want from a news website.

 

[kained&able]

have you seen whats o the suns website?


dave

 

[kyser_soze]

which is what you want from a news website

No, it's what you want from a news website, not necessarily what the X millions of other web users out there want from a news website.

 

[skyscraper101]

The membership database...

I'm sure you're right. But I'm sure it's getting less valuable every day at the same time.

 

[ovaltina]

Good. I hope he is miscalculating, and I hope it costs him dear.

The FT tried to bring in a subscription model but was forced to give up. If FT readers refuse to pay then Sun readers prob will too.

 

[kyser_soze]

The reason the FTs payment model failed was because they launched with free to cosume and had the subs service as an optional added extra. IIRC the only truly successful title to have completely paid for web content was the WSJ, which still charges for full site access and long term use.

 

[jæd]

The Guardian reports that all of the N/I stable including The Times is planning to charge for reading its content online: Is this the beginning of 'pay to view' for all online media, will the Guardian follow suit? Tbh, its been great having the ability to scan all newspapers, I would argue it has helped democracy etc, but is it all over now?

They are going to try a business model (pay for news) that has failed everytime people have tried it...? Newspapers are on the way out, and if they don't realise why they have been successful they will just speed it with this.

 

[fogbat]

After his new wife said she was happy because he had got Viagra, I really couldn't take him seriously.

Christ, can you imagine that face above you during coitus?

Bobbing away, gurning madly. Forehead sheened with sweat. Perhaps a little dribble lands in your eye. The moment of climax approaches, and the gremlin visage creases up.

Further.


And then, horror of horrors, the viagra means that five minutes later he wants to do it again!

*shudders*

 

[jcsd]

A lotof papers did charge for on-line subscription (certainly a lot of the US ones) in about 2001. Most had to abandon it, because it just doesn't work when there's someone doing the same thing for free. Just like Friends Reunited has been made virtually irrelevant by Myspace and then Facebook.

 

[longdog]

I would've thought that if there were one thing the last ten years of the internet had taught us it would be that people want free content and if you start charging for a service some other outfit will pop up doing the same or similar thing free and probably better.

The internet is a big place and all but the most stupid people know how to find for free what some charge for... It's called Google.

 

[jcsd]

If Newscorp could copyright the news then it might be viable, in the end vigorous legal action made itunes viable. You can run a viable payed for servie if your non-payed for competition is the internet black market. I don't think you can run a payed for service if you've got non-payed for service is in the whitemarket unless your offering something truly special.

Luckily you can't copyright the news, only individual articles, even if all the major new services started charging for their services tomorrow there would be nothing to stop someone with some subscritptions starting a free news site using the payed for services as their source. The costs of running such a site could easily be covered by advertising. Don't sites like The Register already get their news from other sources anyway?

 

[pk]

Hopefully this is the nail in the coffin for the Murdoch cunts.

I heard a very nasty rumour about daughter Elozabeth that I cannot and would not repeat in polite company.

 

[T & P]

Hopefully this is the nail in the coffin for the Murdoch cunts.

I heard a very nasty rumour about daughter Elozabeth that I cannot and would not repeat in polite company.

Well we're not polite company so do tell!

Or least PM it.

 

[AnnO'Neemus]

I wonder if the anticipated subscriptions will offset the amount of advertising revenue lost due to there being a smaller potential audience?

I think the way a lot of news and feature articles are accessed online is via individual people posting links from forums like urban and also facebook and via email and so on, and also via links from newsnow.co.uk, Google news, Drudge Report and other sites like Huffington Post or whatever.

Fewer people, I reckon anyway, would actually go specifically to sites like the Sun or Times, if they had to subscribe, and if they came across links elsewhere that they clicked on, and just came up with some annoying message saying you can't read this article that someone else has recommended elsewhere unless you pay a one off fee or subscribe, then people will just click away. And be annoyed. It will generate the opposite of goodwill.

I mean, can you imagine the equivalent irl? You're sitting in the canteen or coffee shop with some colleagues or you're all sitting at your desks eating sandwiches, and someone who is reading a paper pipes up, Ooh, have you heard the latest about xyz, have you seen the before and after photos of that sleb who now has a trout pout? And you show an interest, but as they pass you the paper they say, oh, but you'll have to give me 10p before you can read it.

I'm guessing that a lot of articles that draw readers to a website are the weird and wacky stuff, and people aren't going to want to pay to see a photo or article.

I'm guessing that, currently, a lot of people who click on some weird and wonderful story link will read the article linked to, and then some other headlines will catch their eye, and they'll stay on the site and start clicking around, generating page views, which are valuable in terms of advertising revenues.

Even if the Murdoch stable papers can get someone to pay for that initial article, they're unlikely to get people browsing and looking at more pages featuring adverts from other revenue generating advertisers, if they have to pay for every article they look at. People will just look at one article, if that, and then click the X red box in the top right corner. Fewer page views equals falling advertising revenues.

And who's going to take out a subscription if they only occasionally look at the site? I wouldn't. If I wasn't interested I wouldn't bother paying for it. And if I was sufficiently interested in the story, I'd Google a few key words and find the story elsewhere. For free.

 

[Silva]

That has been tried here in many ways, from simple "membership" paid accounts to deals with ISPs in the dialup era (you could only access content during the night if you were using the said ISP). All of them failed, and the loss of revenue from advertising wasn't compensated by paid visitors.

At this point, the only paid services are access to exact copies of newspapers and archives, which seems fair enough.

 

[kyser_soze]

I wonder if the anticipated subscriptions will offset the amount of advertising revenue lost due to there being a smaller potential audience?

If you've got a paying audience you can charge more for your ads - there's an innate value in paying for something vs getting it free in terms of use by the payee; for example, the wsj audience spend longer on the website than NYT users, exposing them to more ad views.

I presume from the comments about facebook particularly that no one has bothered reading ed's thread about how much running FB costs, for example, and why the advertising/affiliate marketing model is not enough to sustain web businesses, even at the top tier.

Everyone has become so used to the 'everything free' model, and yet nothing comes free.

 

[jæd]

If you've got a paying audience you can charge more for your ads - there's an innate value in paying for something vs getting it free in terms of use by the payee; for example, the wsj audience spend longer on the website than NYT users, exposing them to more ad views.

WSJ is the "newspaper of record" for finance, and other industries. In some jobs, you need to subscribe to be up-to-date. That doesn't apply to The Sun. And you can get around the WSJ pay-wall quite easily...

I presume from the comments about facebook particularly that no one has bothered reading ed's thread about how much running FB costs, for example, and why the advertising/affiliate marketing model is not enough to sustain web businesses, even at the top tier.

Guess where Google makes most of its cash from...?

Everyone has become so used to the 'everything free' model, and yet nothing comes free.

Of course not. Thats why you have a business model in place that makes it looks like you have a free service to entice users in. Yep, Facebook costs a lot to run but they then have an uber-targetted ad network...

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

I suspect that people both buy the paper and look at the web site. It may backfire on him, if he starts charging for the web site folk may stop buying the paper in protest.

Yeah - I buy the same papers as I always have done. I look at most of them online to see what they're saying, but I never would have bought them anyway.

 

[kyser_soze]

And yet they still loose money. FB has yet to turn a profit, as do many of the current crop of meta-destinations on the web.

Google commands something like 40% of ad revenues on the net - and while adsense might make enough money for smaller sites to cover their hosting/server costs, once you go over a certain traffic level hardware and bandwidth costs really start to bite.

Very few people made money in the first dotcom boom, and that was mainly based on the free content/ad revenue model. Nothing has changed since then - if anything, while the web has exploded, the number of websites that are in a position to break even, let alone make profit, that have large audiences, has actually shrunk as search has gobbled up more and more of the ad revenues that are put against online.

Ed's thread

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

Christ, can you imagine that face above you during coitus?

Bobbing away, gurning madly. Forehead sheened with sweat. Perhaps a little dribble lands in your eye. The moment of climax approaches, and the gremlin visage creases up.

Further.


And then, horror of horrors, the viagra means that five minutes later he wants to do it again! :eek:

*shudders*[/QUOTE]

Are you trying to induce mass nausea?