andrewducker | Information wants to be monetised

Information wants to be monetised

Rupert Murdoch has been saying that he wants to take his toys (large chunks of the worldwide newspaper market) and stick them behind paywalls, as advertising doesn't pay enough to keep them afloat.

The problem with this being that I don't know more than three people who would actively pay for access to newspapers. Unless every paper in the world did it at once there'd be a rush of readers from the walled-off papers to the free ones. And if they all did it at once then the Monopolies Commission might have something to say about it.

In addition, I don't tend to read any one online site to the exclusion of others - I read bits of a number of them, and follow links to numerous others. The only way of dealing with this would seem to be microtransactions, which nobody has managed to make profitable yet.

Frankly, I can see paywalls working when it comes to sites providing something that you can't get elsewhere (the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal being good examples of this), but being a recipe for disaster when it comes to most newspapers.

I'm open to persuasion though...

[Poll #1440934]

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Interesting set of responses here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/06/charging-content-sunday-times-website

I can't see myself paying for online news so long as we have the BBC providing it for free. If that option were removed then possibly. The only news content I can see myself paying for would be to a specific technical website, but that is getting into magazine territory rather than that of typical newspapers.

They'd have to get rid of The Metro as well (I know this mostly applies to cities).

You ARE paying for it with a license fee.

Not me, I don't have a TV license but I can still access the BBC news website.

Edit: Should I want to. Which, unless I'm linked there from my flist, I generally don't.

Edited 2009-08-07 12:53 (UTC)

Same is true of forriners, of course, who are free to access it without paying.

Naturally. I just take great pleasure in the fact I don't have a TV licence.

And it being true of foreigners means that us Brits can still access the BBC News even when we're out of the continent.

Absolutely. Something the BBC want to continue, I understand.

Yes, but it IS paid for is what I mean, maybe not by your personally, but by other people than the company.

What is a TV license? How much is it and what does it provide?

You have to have one in the UK if you own a TV that can receive broadcasts.

It costs £150 a year.

It pays for the BBC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom

You have to have one in the UK if you own a TV that can receive broadcasts.

Assuming that it's plugged into an aerial.

Thank you!

You need a TV License if you're using a television to receive a TV signal of any kind, through any source. It originally just funded the BBC, but various channels including all the other terrestrial channels (Ch4, Ch5, ITV) now get a cut.

Ostensibly it keeps the BBC a non-commercial channel - they don't have adverts, except between shows for their own programming. You are legally and functionally able to access the five UK terrestrial channels with your TV License. For any more than that you pay your satellite and digital and cable subscriptions as you would expect. You can of course get these channels anyway, but if you're found to be dodging your license you incur a hefty fine.

The license costs I think about £140 now, although last I checked you could pay less for a BW TV, and pensioners get it free or vastly reduced, can't remember which. The commonly believed - and intentionally perpetrated through careful wording in threatening letters, is that you have to have a license if you own a television, the onus being on you to prove beyond a doubt that you weren't using it to receive a signal, the implication being that this would be impossible.

In practice, however, I've recently discovered that although you confuse everyone you speak to at the licensing call centre, you can in fact with minimum fuss refuse to pay your license on the grounds that you don't watch TV, and once they've visited and established that your TV isn't plugged into an aerial (I sabotage the plug on my aerial cable for good measure) they take you off their shit list and go away quietly. For once the aphorism that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear actually holds true.

Edited 2009-08-07 18:39 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer. I think if such a thing were to be implemented in America, there'd be riots and then we'd vote the survivors out of office.

It dates back from a point where there was only one channel in the UK - BBC Radio - and it was run by the government.

If we were starting from scratch we almost certainly wouldn't end up with one now.

So far as I understand the money goes solely to the BBC - except for a small amount to S4C for Welsh programming (which is made by the BBC and given to them).

There have been pushes to have some of it go to other companies as well - but that hasn't happened yet - except for C4 getting some money to help with the digital switch-over.

Really? I thought the other terrestrials were getting a little now. Must have heard the wrong thing somewhere.

It's been proposed by the government, as part of their digital review, but nothing has happened with it so far - it'll be happening from 2013 or something.

Personally, I think there needs to be a massive change in the BBC's responsibilities. More highbrow stuff, for a start.

Well yes, but it's not exactly the same as paying to access a specific news website. I could stop paying my licence fee and still access the BBC website for free.

Nope. No TV. No licence. :-)

If all the so-called "legit" news sources went behind paywalls, that would be a wonderful opportunity for independent media to step in and provide the hoi polloi (us) with real news. And people who can't afford the New York Times will find themselves reading some Indymedia site to figure out what those kids are yelling about downtown, and it all pops up a level from there.

It's a great time to be alive. We should start a newspaper called the Interesting Times.

Edited 2009-08-07 12:49 (UTC)

I wholey approve of people being made to pay for their right wing lies and propaganda. Might be that less people are exposed to it...

The Telegraph doesn't charge, but there again they're a more intelligent right-wing broadsheet rather than strident propagandists.

I don't see the need to pay for news when I'm already funding the BBC through a license fee. I haven't bought or read a newspaper in years (apart from idly flicking through a Metro on the bus very occasionally).

Specialist content? Maybe, but not a general fee to get at one tiny piece behind a paywall. And, TBH, I'm more likely to pay for a subscription to a specialist TV channel or site (no, not that sort of site!) than for access to a general news site.

I pay per season to get live NHL ice hockey online. Is that specialist "news"? I guess you could call it that given every paper carries sports sections, but it's the only thing I follow that closely so I'll always go to NHL.com or ESPN rather than a genral news site offering a bit of everything because they, by definition, don't have the resources to cover what I want in the depth I want. I guess it's the same as specialist scientific journals that are subscription-only. For day-to-day stuff there's state broadcasters/websites. I can't imagine me ever paying for general news and, as you said, unless the whole industry were to move to that model en masse, it seems like a recipe for disaster for News Corp. And that's not going to happen as the likes of the BBC can't move to a paywall model. There would be a national outcry.

As an offshoot though, if they can find some sort of diverse approach that works (for those that want that content) it might just be applicable to the music industry and drag the RIAA et al kicking and screaming into the 20th century.

The BBC could feasibly stop people without tv licences from looking at their websites. And then they might have to unbundle the website access from the tv licence (so you get a cheaper tv licence if you don't look at their websites). A Tory government might force this on them.

Again, though, the BBC is hardly the bastion of independent commentary that it once might have been. Their greatest achievement is that they do provide a very nice little news digest for lazy people - which is not to be sniffed at. But I can't remember the last time I went to the BBC site actually looking for something. I'm only ever there if I've followed a link from my flist. And if the BBC started charging a separate subscription or making their content available only to those with a UK TV license (which given their worldwide online audience would be ridiculous) then I imagine my international flist would start reproducing the whole content of articles they list to on their blog entries - just as they do now for other subscription papers.

Can you tell that I use my LJ Flist as a personally tailored news-feed? It's fab. You cultivate smart, switched-on friends and they do your surfing for you.

This would probably cost more to implement that it would save, especially given that most UK ISPs use dynamic IP. There are additional compications, too.

For example, at the moment, I have the BBC News website open on the Edinburgh page, but they will see, from the IP, that I am doing so from a hotel room in Canada. I have a current UK TV license, so how would you propose to tell who has a license and who doesn't?

The same way paywalls only let in people who've paid. The obvious way would be that you'd login or register using a code printed on your tv licence.

And I'm not saying it would be a good idea, just that the Tories are more ideologically inclined to do it than Labour, and at least six national newspapers would be very grateful to them afterwards.

But they should then have to offer a website only license, to also apply to non UK residents / freeloaders.

The BBC is like Hollywood - a source of propaganda for 'our' way of life, for 'them' to consume. Just it's less successful...

Hi - just to take this off at a bit of a tangent... If you don't mind answering, I had some questions about the NHL thing!

You're in the UK, right? How do you get the live hockey? Through the GameCenter? What OS and browser do you use? And did you have any trouble getting it to work?

Yeah, I'm in the Uk and using the NHL Center Ice package via europe.espn360.com. Runing on Windows XP and it works in both Firefox and IE, although the recent changes to Firefox in ver3.x seems to have screwed up the video player controls when watching archived games. Live games are OK but all the navigation tools in an archive are broken. Fairly sure that's ESPN's fault / duff design as other videos work ok. Before that though, it was pretty much flawless in delivery and setup in both browsers.

The quality and content of online news would have to improve dramatically for me to consider paying for it.

As it is churnalism, PR non-stories and lifting copy straight off the news wires just doesn't cut it. In fact rather then paywalled copy I might be tempeted to just investigate signing up to a couple of feeds...

However if the paywalled service funded good quality investigative journalism I might then be tempted to subscribe.

Actually, yes - for great reporting I'd be tempted.

this.

Yep, this.

I would pay for news if I were convinced that it was factual, nonpartisan, and as unbiased as humanly possible (admittedly a difficult task). The fact that the news is a business damages its credibility a great deal in my eyes, because it's so unfortunately dependent on sensationalism.

Unfortunately, it's sensational headlines that sell the old fashioned dead-tree versions, so I fear paid-online-news would not be more factual but more sensationalist to get the casual surfer to visit there rather than another site.

Yes, I agree, more's the pity. Which is part of why I answered "no" to the question.

I'd pay for the Onion, though. ;)

If the Guardian went behind a paywall I probably would subscribe.

I would just weep happy tears.

Heh. Comment Isn't Free Any More.

I'd be disappointed that I couldn't carry on arguing with Andrew Brown, I suppose, but I doubt I'd pay for it: I'd feel so dirty.

Unless every paper in the world did it at once there'd be a rush of readers from the walled-off papers to the free ones.

Although if it's true that an advertising model is becoming unsustainable (and I've heard this from others as well - techies, rather than people with a vested interest) then most of the free sources will start going under unless they're subsidised somehow.

True, although a rush of readers from sites that used to be free might bring in more revenue for them.

I would pay for information if there weren't a crazy number of places to get reliable information for free. But that's a condition that I don't think will be met any time soon.

Yes, and have done in the past. If the quality of the reportage is good enough, and the content's relevant enough to me.

(I used to pay for Salon. I would pay for reporting the quality of, say, the Economist, and I happily pay my BBC license fee despite technically not needing to because I approve of their mission and the quality of their content, both drama and news.)

Oh, and I've considered subscribing to the FT, and probably would if I was less of a financial n00b.

Yup, I used to have an economist sub, and I used to have a Salon one. Neither one feels like a newspaper to me though - they're more specialist magazines.

No, wait, maybe Murdoch wants to turn the internet into (European) cable/satelite TV (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/08/a-method-in-murdochs-madness.html). That way he gets paid by ISPs, and the ISPs that cough up get to boast that they come with more of the internet.

I vaguely remember that a US sports body uses the same tactic to get paid for streaming its matches online; I don't know how successful it is at that.

If an ISP told me that money I paid it was going straight to Rupert Murdoch I'd be switching to a different one PDQ...

It's hard to know if I'd ever pay for online news. I expect if I did it'd be for a site run by a small number of decidedly odd people, not a major newspaper.

They're in a bind I think, if they can't make a go of free online newspapers. As apart from whether they could survive using a pay-to-read model, they'll lose influence over public opinion if they're no longer free. That influence and power will move to those papers that remain free.

That said, there'll always be some high-value information that you have to pay for, resulting in the rich having more access to what they've always had more access to.

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