Vanessa Thorpe has an excellent article at The Guardian website which covers the debate this week about whether news content should be free online. The debate was reignited by Rupert Murdoch when he indicated, during the annoncement of a huge fall profits for his News Corp. business in the latest quarter, that it was time to charge for content.
“We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning,” Murdoch said. His volte-face followed background news that profits from News Corp newspapers were down year-on-year from $216m to $7m and that British newspaper advertising revenues were down 21%.
The upshot was, Murdoch concluded, that within a year the web would have utterly changed its financial model and his titles would be leading the pack. Earlier in the week, reports that the Guardian Media Group, the owner of this newspaper, was thinking along similar lines had ricocheted around the globe.
A pay wall to access news is an an old business approach to a new business problem. Just as us newspaper and magzine vendors need to find a new modelforthe evolving circumstances, so too will publishers.
Murdoch is only playing with us, he knew all along that nothing comes for free.Their argument centered on the intrinsic value a product has until it’s given away for free, then saying a company will gain value in the public eye by giving them something for nothing. The old money economy was mentioned to they probably want that to end as well. and what Prince did was just advertising his product but they didn’t say they went to his concert because you know…
Interesting to see how this rolls out. Just to clarify, News Magazines will be availiable on line to read or download at a price?
If it is for a price what do you invisage it being?
Derek