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

[wychwood]

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?

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

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.