Rupert Murdoch Wants Everyone to Pay For What He Is Selling

by Glynnis MacNicol | 7:29 am, August 6th, 2009

» 5 comments

rupert-murdoch-picture-4 Rupert Murdoch is not scared to take your money! While the New York Times willy-nillies around the paid content debate — will they charge? how will they charge? maybe they’ll only charge for parts — Rupe, whose WSJ has been behind a paid firewall since the start, is going to charge for everything! This from the Financial Times

Rupert Murdoch has vowed to charge for all the online content of his newspapers and television news channels, going well beyond his prediction in May that the company would test pay models on one of its stronger papers within the year….”We intend to charge for all our news websites,” Mr Murdoch said. “If we’re successful, we’ll be followed by all media,” he added, predicting “significant revenues” from charging for differentiated news online.

This announcement, which was the top headline on Drudge overnight, follows reports yesterday that News Corps’ “fourth-quarter operating income…plunged more than 30 percent” mostly due to MySpace.

The obvious question remains: will people pay? The Wall Street Journal has managed to maintain a somewhat successful firewall mostly due to the fact that at the end of the day it is a niche publication, which the business world deems necessary. As much as we love it, the same cannot really be said for the New York Post, whose website, mind you, is a nightmare to navigate.

Time will tell if it’s a smart move; don’t ever count Rupe’s media savvy out. Moreover perhaps by the time this all this comes about we will have made the larger paid content leap and it won’t seem like such a stretch. That said, consumers these days are a savvy bunch and won’t just pay for anything. Good content is key in this brave new media world (another reason the WSJ has been able to continue charging) and Murdoch’s others papers — New York Post, News of the World, etc. — have traditionally trucked in tabloid scandal and splashy headlines, neither of which are hard to find elsewhere on the Internets, free of charge.

Financial Times, New York Post, New York Times, News Corp., rupert murdoch, State of Journalism, Wall St. Journal

b.j.

General interest papers, even prestigious ones, have less of a hold on an audience than more niche publications, but depending on how many people are willing to pay and how much they are willing to pay as well as how much of the content remains free, it’s not such a crazy idea for some to try to charge for content. As I’ve said before, if the money is used to reinvest in the paper and thus make a subscription more valuable, it’s definitely worth it. I’m guessing that The Times of London is sort of like The New York Times; charging might work, but it also might fail.

But the New York Post? Aside from perhaps Page Six, is anyone really relying on that paper for much else? Hell, if Murdoch can make it work, good for him, but I don’t see it working.
DaleGribble

I predict failure.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Shimizu-Randall/519832494 Shimizu Randall

What we have is problem of old vs web advertising. Murdoch is right to complain when his not making any money from free content. The problem is that most people are not interested in seeing a bunch of banner ads. Newspapers have a lot full and half pages ads and most people are interested in seeing these on the web. So my proposal is to use implement Google adwords and split the profit with newspapers.