Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to charge for access to all news sites by next summer
The end of the free Web may be upon us if Rupert Murdoch has anything to say about it, and as of now he plans to lead by example.
Rupert Murdoch, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of News Corp, announced yesterday that by next summer his company would be charging for online access to all of its news related sites. This came after it was revealed that the company had lost $203 million in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year, bringing the total loss for the company to $3.4 billion for the past twelve months.
Mr. Murdoch had previously announced that he planned to test a payment system on one of his news sites this year, but after the news of yet another down quarter, that plan has escalated to a full roll-out of the plan. According to The Guardian, Mr. Murdoch said, “Quality journalism is not cheap. The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news Web sites.”
Of course the big question here is really how much will this add to the company coffers when pretty much every other news site out there is currently free? Will people pay for access to Fox News when they can just as easily go to CNN or the BBC to read the same stories for free? Goldman Sachs is estimating that this scheme will bring in about $200 million dollars annually, but that is a drop in the bucket compared to the $6 billion all of News Corp’s newspapers bring in each year. Is $200 million really worth the ill-will this will cost the company with its readers?
This entire turn of events has been brought on by a drop in ad revenue to the sites, but in these difficult economic times can you really expect consumers to pay for access to news that can be obtained for free from local television stations, radio news or other online portals? If, and that is a big “if”, this plan is successful, we could see other companies try it, but expect every one to take a wait and see mode for now.
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August 6th, 2009
“Rupert Murdoch” and “Quality journalism” don’t belong in the same sentence.
Pay walls are fine, but good luck with getting anything more than the most rabid fans to ante up. Especially when some other sources will stay free/ad-based.
Speaking of, will pages for subscribers be ad-free or will they be inundated with ads even though they’ve already paid for access to the content?
August 8th, 2009
Not going to work. Didn’t work when the actual content of pay sites were better by far than average commercial sites when much of code was put out manually by tags and text editors.
That ship has sailed.