Today marks a new dawn on the Internet, The Johnston Press have started charging for written content on their websites. Though hardly a world known printing press the company make newspapers in the North of the UK and their move is set to the be the first of many. Newscorp, the Rupert Murdoch owned empire is going to follow suit by next Summer and the question of this article is whether such a model will ever succeed?
Firstly let me preface this and stop the left wing agenda on Crossfire in their tracks by stating the obvious that you will never have to pay for reading Loekinos latest journal or Jaime ‘Waki’ Oliver’s most recent cooking experiment. The reason this column is here because we are the early adopters, like porn drives television technology, gaming and gamers drive much of internet technology and consumption trends.
Rupert Murdoch who’s empire owns Fox, The Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Sun and many more stated "Quality journalism is not cheap the digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites."
The reason for this is simple, Websites with salaried staff don’t make anywhere near as much revenue as newspapers do. A 1 off placement in a non key page in The Sun can cost as much as £50,000 and there are hundreds of those placements per publication. That £50k reaches The Sun’s 1 million readership, where as on The Sun’s website they have far fewer placements and you’d need not spend anywhere near that amount of money to hit that readership in a one off hit. The overheads may be lower and indeed maybe shared with the newspaper overheads but it is simply not profitable and in times like these where advertising spend is down across the board, where do you turn?
The problem with making websites pay-to-read is how quickly users may defect to the competition or simply not come back. In the UK for example, one of the biggest websites is the BBC – publically paid for it can never charge subscription for its products, I read both the BBC & The Times for my news, but if ones free and ones subscription offering almost the same product (all be it I prefer The Times for its detailed coverage) who am I going to chose? That is not an argument that has gone unnoticed as the Murdoch’s have attacked the BBC’s online ‘monopoly’ in the UK however that is unlikely to change.
What could happen is that traffic simply defects from one site to another, the viral spread of information across the web is infectious. If SkySports charge me for reading football news then I’ll go to TeamTalk and anyone who doesn’t know about TeamTalk will hear about it when the disgruntled conversation arises about how unhappy people are about their subscription.
Youtube proves that quality of the content is not always king on the web but quantity, with that being the case any news based subscription model is destined to failure.
Firstly let me preface this and stop the left wing agenda on Crossfire in their tracks by stating the obvious that you will never have to pay for reading Loekinos latest journal or Jaime ‘Waki’ Oliver’s most recent cooking experiment. The reason this column is here because we are the early adopters, like porn drives television technology, gaming and gamers drive much of internet technology and consumption trends.
Rupert Murdoch who’s empire owns Fox, The Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Sun and many more stated "Quality journalism is not cheap the digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites."
The reason for this is simple, Websites with salaried staff don’t make anywhere near as much revenue as newspapers do. A 1 off placement in a non key page in The Sun can cost as much as £50,000 and there are hundreds of those placements per publication. That £50k reaches The Sun’s 1 million readership, where as on The Sun’s website they have far fewer placements and you’d need not spend anywhere near that amount of money to hit that readership in a one off hit. The overheads may be lower and indeed maybe shared with the newspaper overheads but it is simply not profitable and in times like these where advertising spend is down across the board, where do you turn?
The problem with making websites pay-to-read is how quickly users may defect to the competition or simply not come back. In the UK for example, one of the biggest websites is the BBC – publically paid for it can never charge subscription for its products, I read both the BBC & The Times for my news, but if ones free and ones subscription offering almost the same product (all be it I prefer The Times for its detailed coverage) who am I going to chose? That is not an argument that has gone unnoticed as the Murdoch’s have attacked the BBC’s online ‘monopoly’ in the UK however that is unlikely to change.
What could happen is that traffic simply defects from one site to another, the viral spread of information across the web is infectious. If SkySports charge me for reading football news then I’ll go to TeamTalk and anyone who doesn’t know about TeamTalk will hear about it when the disgruntled conversation arises about how unhappy people are about their subscription.
Youtube proves that quality of the content is not always king on the web but quantity, with that being the case any news based subscription model is destined to failure.
Secondly, you have sites such as http://www.experts-exchange.com/ that charge a visitor for reading solutions to coding problems. Fortunately for us, there's a glitch (or feature?) on the website which allows visitors to scroll down and see the solutions anyway. I don't know if people actually invest money into this, but it makes sense. There's a similar website for Oracle users, and the first thing people do when working with Oracle (or should do) is take a subscription on that website, cause it offers a shitload of support that is very interesting and useful.
My conclusion is that if the content is worth it, people will pay for it. But if you can easily find the same content somewhere else on the net, then there's no way people will pay for it.
Did they actually have that first?
http://independentsources.com/2006/07/12/worst-company-urls/
:DDDDDDDDDDDDDD
I'll pay for something which benefits me, but for the rest of the news I'm less picky, and will just go with whatever is easiest (and thus free).
Welcome to 1984
However I don't think it will come to this.
I fear for that
2. Yes, maybe it all sounds a bit paranoia; but in a democracy it is absolutely vital for the citizenship to have access to the most accurate information and opinions. I just want to keep the step as low as possible.
Your saying that the mind-set of all those people are the same as our post-modern condition. don't be so superficial.
e: language mistake :-O
But I do know the concept of a facbar/fakbar, although I'm guessing this guy will overwhelm me with historical terms ^^
(6th August), setting the date to July 2010. And even though it may sound like a revolution, and to us readers, even a bit controversial, most of the media executives approve of this idea. None of them, though, wanted to take the first step into the unknown.
Local papers - this is the ones with less income and less readers - can try to put the paid content option into test as soon as possible. If it proves to be a wrong approach, if the readers will reject it - then they can easily come back to a 'classic' free web content profile, and their readers will come back as well, because usually there's no alternative on the local press market.
However, huge corporations, like Murdoch's, are in a tight spot. It's a win/lose situation, there's no compromise. Once the online readers decide to move away to a free content website, big corps will be facing a dire situation.
I still think that sooner or later the paid content option will become a common thing. In USA you can read high quality articles online, written by top-notch journalists. So, if one of them writes a piece to a newspaper, readers pay for it. It's logical that they pay for the same article in the web - the paper has to pay the salaries this way or another, no matter if their workers post on the net or in the newspapers.
well, I guess it's some kinda principle that I wouldn't pay for any internet stuff, so if everything starts to pay, I'm sure I'll be among those who try to cheat it in any way
But lets take an example from the music industry. Since the internet, Napster and its offspring's the income of the music industry has never decreased. What has changed is that artists are earning a lot more by performing live where they get to keep a huge part of the earnings, whereas they almost get none from selling CD's. Maybe I'm just a 'left-wing' lunatic. All I know that you will get almost no repercussions from stealing a cd in shop whereas in some countries downloading the same CD online can get you fined 100 times more
Anyway, I dont believe in top down media anymore, where 'news' is created by few and copied by away so every newspaper has the same stories, may it be with a one or two day delay in it.
In a democracy (and let us assume that most here are in one) it is vital that everyone has immediate access to the most rigorous political commentary. This one, small, step towards a payment model is, to me, a very dangerous path to be walked by the "news-industry". I don't care how they (editors, commentators) get payed, in the worst case, let it be the governement
Yes: 1. and No: 2.
1. Of course, a governement orginises schools (I am going to restrict the issue to this, because I think the issue concerning media is a more specific example) and in doing so, it will 'influence' education. I think the main question is to make the division of society-government: With which values do we want our children to be raised and which of these values are unacceptable (most direct example is nazism). This is a question that we, as a society, have to pose. There is no 'correct' answer, it is 'essentially' a choice.
2. If the values of a given school education program are openess to critique and doubt, why would students not be encouraged to doubt the very same program they are introduced to? In other words: we can implement the very same negation of the education model used in explaining this debate to them. "Raising" the new citizens is not what we conventially understand to be "raising": it is trying to make our children cope, intelligently, with a mass media society (to return to the subject of media).
Yet here also, there is never going to be an ideal situation. Partisanity is and will always be present, not because utopia is unreasonable, but because truth as itself is mediated to the human condition: the question imposes its own answer (Derrida is a brlliant philosopher in this perspective).
It is our duty to try and motivate our choices thoroughly, so that our children, once they come to a certain age, understand and more importantly, forgive us for the choices we made for them.
In saying this you're presupposing that there is a homogeneous way in which we want our children raised. Who is "we"? You might want to raise your kid in one way, but that man who lives down the street might disagree entirely.
That is a very large if, though. Can you honestly say that the above describes your primary and secondary educational experience? While I went to good schools, they certainly weren't devoid of ideology. I believe it was Mark Twain who said "Don't let schooling interfere with your education".
Of course, schooling and media are never going to be nonpartisan, but I don't think that's what the problem is. To go back to the media example take FOX news who are extremely biased towards the Republicans and make no secret of it, compared to the state-funded BBC who claim that they're neutral even though they're not.
Totally disagree on Derrida, by the way, I think he's awful.
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Again, I am talking about an ideal. You cannot be raised unideological, what we need to do is filter out the excessive ones and try to 'balance' the others (I am not going to explain further, you know probably what I mean, and I do not intended to write an essay: I am certainly not an expert on defining to the detail what we should and should not learn our children...).
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A neutrality claim is dangerous, I agree with you.
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I am no radical Derridean, but he is brilliant (I don't know how much you know from him, but I am not a disciple of post-modernist nihilism (like many who claimed to be Derridean were))
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Listening_to_you_at_last:_EU_plans_to_tap_cell_phones
The BBC will remain free so the moment the fees are introduced it looks like I'll just have to rely on that instead. Can't see any logic in paying a subscription fee for a news site that has no exclusive content and is unlikely to have improved reporting when compared to free competitors anyway.
lol, the Sun and quality in the same sentence?? haha :DDDD
And it's not exactly " a new dawn". A lot of newspapers do it already but I get your point.