News Corp plans for news subscriptions begins to take shape
At least one of the newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has begun to outline how it expects readers to begin paying for the news.
According to the Guardian, the News International owned newspaper the Times will be offering two models of payment for access to its news: a subscription model and a 24-hour access to a daily edition. James Harding, the editor of the Times, is saying that the newspaper is pledging to “rewrite the economics of newspapers.” Mr. Harding, speaking to an audience of senior editors and executives at the Society of Editors conference in Stansted, Essex, also said the current timeline called for this to begin happening in the spring of 2010.
While it is well known that Rupert Murdoch is planning to charge access to the Web sites of all his news properties, the exact details of how he planned to do this had yet to be made clear. This is the first indication the public has had on what exactly the payment schemes would be like, and also the first indication that there would be no option for micro-payments to purchase one article at a time. ”You have to be very careful with article-only economics,” Mr. Harding said. “You will find yourself writing a lot more about Britney Spears and a lot less about Tamils in northern Sri Lanka.”
Mr. Harding indicated that the fact residents of Great Britain purchased 270 million books last year was a good barometer of how people were willing to pay for the written word. However, it would seem he somehow is not taking into account the recent survey that showed less than half of the residents surveyed in his country said they were willing to pay for news online. Even those that are willing to pay are not too keen on paying more than a few dollars a month.
Only time will tell how this will work out for News Corp, but if it is unable to get other news outlets to follow along, this could end very badly for it.
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November 17th, 2009
Do they REALLY fail to realize that the experience of reading a book is nothing like the experience of reading an ebook? Seriously?
Hey, maybe they’ll be on to something if they allow me to buy daily access for the same $.25 that I can buy the paper at the local convenience store, or $1.00 for the Sunday paper.
I would agree micropayments on a per article basis might be lucrative but are likely to further alienate their readers. No doubt an abundance of craptastic articles with sensationalistic headlines (say, like over at GAMER.BLORGE) will proliferate…
November 17th, 2009
IMO for this to have any pote3ntial to work you need both subscriptions and micropayments. Subscriptions for your everyday readers; that’s your bread and butter. Also supporting micropayments will allow people to link to your articles and get non-subscribers to pay to read them.
But overall as long as there is still free news out there, this is destined to fail.