- Monday, 9 November 2009
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It is much more important to know what sort of patient has a disease than what sort of disease a patient has - Sir William Osler
Murdoch wants to start charging for online news
RUPERT MURDOCH, the bloke who made billions out of cheapening news reckons it's high time web sites started charging for content.
"The current days of the Internet will soon be over," Murdoch told hacks yesterday as he explained how, since his News Corporation charges for views of the Wall Street Journal and gets away with it, he reckons he can apply the pay-per-view model to other papers like the Sun and the Times.
"That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal's experience," he said.
In a conference call with hacks and analysts, Murdoch said the pay-to-read model could be with us, "within the next 12 months‚"
Murdoch was trying to explain why his News Corporation's operating profits fell 47 per cent to $755 million in its latest quarter.
He seems to think that giving stuff away doesn't help. µ
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...Mr Murdoch is living in a dream world. Having said that, anyone dumb enough to read The Sun, probably is dumb enough to pay to use his crappy websites.
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Still not sure how that helps you though.
BBC website news will be free. If the sun starts charging then guess where all his visitors will go?
I say do it murdoch you idiot and I can't wait to see your face when it all goes boobies vertical.
news piracy
So much for free press. Mr. Murdoch your idiot.
here's 50p from me too, they are better than GZ's Ps because mine are lower-case as required in the specs from the article :)
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Gee,
Could it be that less people are interested in paying for online news that they can get for free from other sites? Only idle rich news junkies who work for banks will pay for news content online. I certainly won't. Will you?
Not enough people care about the 'real' news to support a lot of newspapers. In the end, few will remain. If it wasn't from the internet, it would have been from apathy.
Murdoch is a dinosaur (in his case, a narcistic-o-saur).
One of the core concepts for networks like the Internet is that they can route around blockages and damage. That means no one can control information flow on a network as it simply routes around it. That is the same when people look for information. (The only way the old guard could stop it is with full on global Big Brother and they are trying).
So Murdoch wants to restrict access. He can try as much as he likes to get old dinosaur news organizations on his side, fearful of becoming extinct, but the more he tries to control and block content, the more he creates a pressure for change away from that control. People will simply move to free sources of information. People seeking news route around his kind of control.
If Murdoch really wants to see the future he should learn about computational Journalism, because in the next decade there is going to become ever more sources of free information available through computational Journalism. The trick then will be to create sites which attract viewers with interesting aggregate collections and interpretations of the free news. Sites with some personality which attract like minded people. But its going to be free information regardless of Murdoch's wishes. These rich control freaks can no longer corral people into controlling what they read like the old days of the media. They need content to attract people. Forcing people to pay no longer works, people simply move on and the old dinosaurs become extinct.
News organizations are not going to become extinct. All that will become extinct is their control freak attitude of controlling what people read and forcing people to pay for that content. The News organizations that attract customers will get advertising and other incomes like in some cases merchandising etc.. while the old narcistic control freak tactic companies become extinct.
The sooner the better. Bye Murdoch.
I would not even use Murdoch's newspapers as toilet paper. The purpose of toilet paper is to remove the brown sh!t, not to add more.
HAHAHAHAHAHhah *breathes* HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Can Murdoch really be so stupid?
"It's better, but is it $x better?"
If it's worth reading, people will pay for it. However, it may not be worth x amount of money to read.
You still buy the local newspaper, don't you? Maybe just when job searching? Because it's worth the $0.50.
But with all the other news sites out there, I doubt he'll gain anything but disappointment from this.
Please, you're a fool Murdock whom would ever think of paying for access to Fox News? Besides, I hear they are fairly poor in the trailer parks these days in the old US of A.
I think he knows something we don't, isn't the restructuring of the Internet on the Builderburge 2009 agenda this year?
I hear they are after terrorists and they chat here freely and it threatens the lives of us all! Ooh noes..
I'm sure I remember many sites that used to charge for content, but time has faded my memory. No wait a second it was about a decade ago, so I can still remember clearly.
Obviously what MadDoc means is that content wont stay free if he has his way.
Right from the earliest days, of the Internet, we’ve had companies thinking they had content valuable enough to pull people into their particular proprietary walled gardens.
It’s never worked. The Internet isn’t about content, it’s about connectivity—people’s ability to interact with other people. Nobody’s content is valuable enough to get in the way of that. Content is only a means to that end, not an end in itself.
I can't help but keep drawing analogies to what happened to control and distribution when large-scale automated printing presses came out.
Initially the cost was quite low enabling almost anyone to produce literature for a moderate cost, but a number of entrenched interests quickly got a stranglehold on it, and pretty much gave birth to the status quo for the next 200 years.
I think we should be taking a far more active role in making sure that the same thing doesn't happen to our society with regards to the internet.
If these kind of breaks only happen once every 200 years or so, we really ought to be taking threats to the free flow of information seriously.
If he starts charging a fee, people will simply move to free sources. It's not like the news is extremely unique or exclusive.
His online news "empire" will fade away much like pay-for encyclopedias, like Encyclopedia Britanica, will to Wikipedia. It isn't to say that Wikipedia's content is in any way equal or better than EB's, but it's free, and it's "good enough."
Well if you give away free content, why would people buy the printed version?
It annoys me that on the one hand the newspapers all have websites and then they complain that sales of their papers is falling.
Duh guys! Why not simply switch off your web sites. There I've single-handed saved you millions and increased your sales.
Don't thank me all at once. :-)
I can't help but think that this will be good news for other websites like the BBC, Guardian etc who will as a result get more viewers and therefore more advertising revenue (well obviously not for the BBC in the UK).