Information wants to be monetised

[andrewducker]

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]

Comments

[mooism.livejournal.com]

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.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

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.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

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?

[mooism.livejournal.com]

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.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

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...