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

[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.