The Times Erects a Paywall, Plays Double Or Quits 344
DCFC writes "News International, owners of The Times and The Sunday Times announced today that from June readers will be required to pay £1 per day or £2 per week to access content. Rupert Murdoch is delivering on his threat to make readers pay, and is trying out this experiment with the most important titles in his portfolio. No one knows if this will work — there is no consensus on whether it is a good or bad thing for the industry, but be very clear that if it succeeds every one of his competitors will follow. Murdoch has the luxury of a deep and wide business, so he can push this harder than any company that has to rely upon one or two titles for revenue."
Good luck with that (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a good thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:so, that's like $350/year (USD) ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Lets iterate this hypothesis a bit.
It's 350$ a year if you wish to pay avery day anew, but it's 104$ if you pay every week.
The next step I would implement, will be 50$ if you pay once per month, followed up with 35$ if you pay once per year.
So if you subscribe for a year you get a rebate of 90%. Suddenly this scheme does not look so bad at all.
No decent micro-payment system. (Score:3, Interesting)
For these business models to work there needs to be a decent micro-payment system. I don't want to get out my credit card for every single website, especially for small amounts, and don't want to pay a subscription for a service I don't know if I will regularly use. Paypal is currently the only real player, and in my opinion they are a bunch of crooks who are playing legal games to avoid having banking regulations applied to them and subsequently having their dirty laundry aired.
National and international banking systems need to get together and figure out a proper micro-payment system (with amount limits so dodgy websites can't drain your account) before this sort of business model will take off. I might be tempted to pay 10 cents to read an article, but not if I have to pull out my credit card on the spot or sign up for a subscription first. Instead what will happen is regular users will sign up and everyone else will go to the free sites. The results being the regulars pay more to cover the running costs and possibly the failure of the website to sustain itself due to loss of ad revenue.
This might have worked... (Score:4, Interesting)
...before Murdoch destroyed one of the greatest newspapers in the world. I'd gladly pay to read the NYT or the Washington Post online, just as I've paid for the WSJ online for a decade, but pay to read Murdoch's crap? Heck, I'd gladly pay money to keep it from showing up in my search results.
Murdoch (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the day, when Murdoch started in Australia, his commercial rival was Kerry Packer. Both of them lobbied hard to have media cross ownership laws broken down so they eventually ended up owning most of the Australian media outlets (newspapers and such like). Murdoch left Australia, where his base company Publishing and Broadcast Limited was formed after establishing a strong commercial base with Fox in the US. Murdoch is grooming his son to take over, and he seems even scarier than dad.
Meanwhile, back in Au, Packer died and his son took over who ended up selling off his Broadcast and Publishing businesses to get into Casinos.
The void left behind is utterly bland, and the media cross ownership laws left behind have just allowed companies interested in asset stripping to come in and, well, do what they do.
The only interesting media is Publicly owned, and I hope the BBC will reverse their decision to back away from internet media. It's that kind of thinking that is the future. It's probably time for these old commercial medias to die off anyway having seen what they look like when they die. The irony in all this was to watch the public broadcasters point out that some PBL papers were plagiarising peoples weblogs at the very time Murdoch was talking of paywalls. If they can't develop original content, people will see it's crap, Faux looses advertising revenue and Murdoch just put another nail in commercial media's coffin.
It will be interesting to watch this comedy play out.
Re:so, that's like $350/year (USD) ? (Score:2, Interesting)
The whole point of the 1$/day price is to make people that try to "game" the paper and only buy it on the good news days and not the slow ones pay more, while the weekly subscription makes you buy the whole week whether something interesting happens in the folllowing 6 days or not. The risk/value proposition is completely different and so your extrapolation is nonsense too. 104$/year is probably what they expect to make on a regular reader, maybe you can push it down to 80-90$ by paying for all year but there's no way you're getting another 2/3rds rebate just paying yearly instead of weekly.
5%... possible? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's hinted in the article -- and I've seen it elsewhere -- that if they retain 5% of their current online readership, that counts as a win.
That's a small enough number that my instinct ("Nobody'll pay for it") doesn't feel all that reliable.
Is it just about possible that 5% will pay? I think it's unlikely, but not completely impossible. It'll be interesting to see, that's for sure.
Deja vu all over again? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:5%... possible? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The Guardian (Score:4, Interesting)
The Guardian is indeed an excellent source of free news, but with pre-tax losses of nearly $134m [pressgazette.co.uk] last year, it's anyone's guess how long that will last.
The BBC isn't in the same boat, of course, since it's funded by British licence fee payers, but should the Conservatives win the next general election, its operation also looks set [newstatesman.com] to be scaled back considerably.
Re:£1 per day to access online news? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the same as the cover price for the physical printed edition. Which is ridiculous- who in their right mind could justify paying the same for online data as they pay for printed/shipped/delivered media?
Surely the costs being lower should mean the price is lower, right?
Re:The Dream and The Reality (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The Guardian (Score:3, Interesting)
I read The Guardian and consider myself pretty left-wing on most issues, but their bias sometimes makes me cringe. They do provide some interesting coverage, but they're nowhere near as objective as the BBC, for example, and even further away from a hypothetical unbiased news source.
I used to read The Times, because it's easier to filter out bias when it's bias that you disagree with, but I stopped when it went beyond bias and into just talking drivel.
Re:How do you get that? (Score:1, Interesting)
That's right. In a free market the banks would not have been bailed out. They would have failed, their assets sold off cheaply to other banks. But it's not a free market, at least not at the "too big to fail" level.
So, when damburger blamed "free market fundamentalism" for the crash, he was talking out of his ass. What a surprise. The guy's a nutball. He advocates big-state planned economies, and when they fail, he blames the failure on the "free market". Your doublethink is plusungood, Comrade Damburger.
Re:The Guardian (Score:3, Interesting)
Historically all we (consumers) paid for was the paper, ink and delivery. The content was paid for by advertising revenue - this hasn't changed: we pay the ISP for the delivery and it's electric ink and paper.
There is no reason why we can't continue to get all our news in this model. Indefinitely.
This is the important bit. It made sense to have a YourTown Gazette in the paper world that carried all the world's news. It made no sense in the paper era to have only a few papers printed and shipped all over. Yet even in the paper era AP and Reuters sprang up to fill the need that YourTown Gazette can't have a reporter in every location on earth. And the internet amplifies this. There are simply too many redundant entities trying to deliver the same information and each paying a staff to do this. It is, as you have stated, not sustainable.
For international news there needs to be only a few agencies that report the same thing. These can easily be sustained by ad revenues: Google is proof of this. Local news will take a hit; I don't see some communities having the resources or draw to have "professional" news reporting, and maybe that's a good thing. Community driven news will spring up: blogs etc to cover the local issues and those that are interested in the local news will read and contribute. Think Open Source News. It's the communities, discussions and interactions that matter as much as the events.
My prediction is that like all paywalls before, this one will fail to generate any meaningful revenue, but will hopefully begin to shake-out the industry into something sustainable.
Re:The Guardian (Score:5, Interesting)
Thankfully, the Guardian, which has far superior journalism and doesn't seek to ram politics down everyone's throats in "news" stories like News International's papers do (people often talk of the paper being liberal, which on its comments pages is largely true, but they do a good job of keeping it out of their news reporting)
That generally just means their political bent matches yours, so you don't notice it as much as in the papers you disagree with. In 1992, the Scott Trust (The Guardian's owner) explicitly declared "remaining faithful to liberal tradition" as part of its central objective for The Guardian. So it's not just "largely true"; it's part of the mission.
While US newspapers make a big palaver about their news reporting being politically neutral and objective, UK newspapers do not -- in the UK there is much greater recognition that the choice of what news to report is itself affected by the editor's political beliefs (what they consider important), so there can be no such thing as a politically neutral paper even if the articles are written in dry matter-of-fact language. Rather than trying to pretend to be above all that, the UK papers are instead fairly open about their editorial biases, and it's well known which ones lean towards which readerships -- for example the famous Yes Minister [wikipedia.org] quote. Similarly, where I used to work we often found ourselves commenting in the tea room "The Independent is leading with a story on global warming. It must be Thursday." In short, the UK papers care about editorial independence but not neutrality.
The exception, of course, is the BBC, which has a legislative requirement to portray a "balanced" view on any political matter.
Re:The market pays what a service is worth. (Score:3, Interesting)
Furthermore, the notion that your mythical 'market' can correctly assign prices seems to have been blown out of the water by the recent failure of that market to correctly price financial derivatives.
Why do you think that? I think the meltdown in derivative pricing was precisely the invisible hand correcting the over-valuing of those derivatives. If anything, its been the government's interference in that market correction that has slowed down the process. If Bush and then Obama had just stayed out of it instead of trying to prop it up, those prices would be in tune with reality by now.
Re:8 pounds a month (Score:3, Interesting)
We can sit around and carp about government corruption, and wait for the government to oversee itself better, but the real cure is sunlight - somebody indepdent looking over their shoulder, namely the press. We need to find a way to pay them to do more of that.
Advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Opensource the news ? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The market pays what a service is worth. (Score:3, Interesting)
The market always works, it just doesn't always work the way free market fundamentalists think it does.
You are indeed right, most of the time it will eventually find the optimal situation, though like most optimizing routines it has the occasional issue with local maximums.
The issue comes in your definition of optimal. It is perhaps true that in a truly 100% free market, optimal would really be optimal, but a truly 100% free market has not and cannot ever exist. In the absence of such perfection, you need to be a bit careful about the constraints you put on the system so that you end up with an optimal you can live with. The current system seems to have the constraints set in such a way that the optimal solution is that rich people get richer and poor people get poorer, long term consequences are ignored, and generally greed is the driving factor.
Now personally I believe that as a society we should, generally through our government set the constraints we want, and then let the free market find the optimal solution for those constraints. If a behavior is socially or environmentally costly tax it, if a behavior is socially or environmentally beneficial, provide tax relief for it. Generally make the things you want to have happen more desirable and the things you don't less so, then let the free market find the optimal solution within the constraints you have set.
Unfortunately at the moment taxes are largely about political expediency as opposed to providing rational constraints for the market. Non behavior related corporate taxes for instance are largely a waste of time. Corporations just raise the prices of their goods and/or services and it ends up just being a sales tax on individuals again.
Re:Use the BBC (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you tried to live without a TV in the UK? I did for 6 years. The TV Licensing people refused to believe that I didn't have one and kept pestering me to get a license. One year I had to sign two copies of the "I promise I don't have a TV set" form within a fortnight, speak to them on the phone and to deal with a TV License Inspector who turned up on my doorstep at 6pm one day.
The funny thing is, I became a great BBC Radio 4 [bbc.co.uk] fan during that time. It's paid for by the TV License fee, but you don't need such a license to listen to the radio...
It's a funny old world.
Re:8 pounds a month (Score:5, Interesting)
Donate to WikiLeaks? Quality investigative reporting (in the realm of government) is amost a myth. Some journalists have the balls to repeat the claims of an anonymous source while keeping the source anonymous, and in the pre-internet days that was important, but its rapidly becoming less so.
I do see quality investigative reporting in the realm of consumer advocacy, but in politics the press has devolved to repeating any claim that damages the party they don't like, without even spending 5 minutes of Google to see if it passes the laugh test.
The National Inquirer is up for a Pulitzer [nytimes.com] this year, believe it or not, for running a tawdry sex scandal story about a politician. If that's not a sign of how far political journlism has fallen, I don't know what is.
Re:Use the BBC (Score:3, Interesting)
Now can't he? look what Berlusconi did. Don't feel secure when you ain't.
Re:Advertising (Score:3, Interesting)
No
You see, here's the big problem that Murdoch and friends have with "free-news". The newspapers and magazines, can't get any kind of useful stats on it's users if they just give it away. They use this data in a bunch of ways, one is to supply it to their advertisers.
These guys just don't sell the news, they sell this data as well. It's probably more important to them than selling the news. If you use a credit card to purchase something, this has your full name, address, purchase history through lookup on other shared db's and so much more.
Can't they get around this by striking a deal to share cookies / LSOs with sites like Facebook and Hulu (which already have collaborated in this manner). Most users don't block these, especially LSOs, and all the news site has to do it match it's visitors against a profile on a site like Facebook who then happily provides full demographic information on the user and all their friends (as part of the arrangement), and Hulu can even match that with television viewing habits for the lot.