The Times paywalls go up...
Discussion
tinman0 said:
And if they can turn those into paying customers, then they are laughing all the way to the bank.
5% freetards vs 1.5% paying customers. I'd take the paying customers any day of the week. (Assuming the free trial will convert favourably).
How low will their market share get when you actually have to pay? I've not used the site since you had to register to view and haven't missed it at all.5% freetards vs 1.5% paying customers. I'd take the paying customers any day of the week. (Assuming the free trial will convert favourably).
RYH64E said:
tinman0 said:
And if they can turn those into paying customers, then they are laughing all the way to the bank.
5% freetards vs 1.5% paying customers. I'd take the paying customers any day of the week. (Assuming the free trial will convert favourably).
How low will their market share get when you actually have to pay? I've not used the site since you had to register to view and haven't missed it at all.5% freetards vs 1.5% paying customers. I'd take the paying customers any day of the week. (Assuming the free trial will convert favourably).
Hits <> income
tinman0 said:
RYH64E said:
tinman0 said:
And if they can turn those into paying customers, then they are laughing all the way to the bank.
5% freetards vs 1.5% paying customers. I'd take the paying customers any day of the week. (Assuming the free trial will convert favourably).
How low will their market share get when you actually have to pay? I've not used the site since you had to register to view and haven't missed it at all.5% freetards vs 1.5% paying customers. I'd take the paying customers any day of the week. (Assuming the free trial will convert favourably).
Hits <> income
Guido reckons that 1.8% will halve again when they ask people to actually pay. It would be interesting to know what the final figures shake down as; revenue from paying readers and revenue from advertisers when compared with the advert revenues from a much larger reader base without paywalls.
Was the impetus for this move from Rupert himself. I wonder if the old boy is loosing his touch. Perhaps he just don't like the idea of 'giving away. his product free of charge. He is also apparently keen to turn Sky News into a UK version of the God awful Fox News. The similarities are already beginning to creep in.
He or News International seem to be hell bent on making an excellent online news paper unread by a large section of the population and creating news channel for suitable only for the small minded.
He or News International seem to be hell bent on making an excellent online news paper unread by a large section of the population and creating news channel for suitable only for the small minded.
Interesting article here: http://www.daniweb.com/news/story240694.html
Daniweb said:
Rupert Murdoch is not a stupid man, his business empire is evidence of that. For anyone to become a media mogul requires smarts, but those smarts seem to be deserting Murdoch as he continues to play the fool and deny that old monetisation methods do not work for the new online model that has so totally embraced news media.
Gord Hotchkiss over at Searchnewz says "Rupert Murdoch's rantings are so out of touch that they're bordering on lunacy, or, at a minimum, stupidity. He's mad that his old revenue model isn't working anymore" and I couldn't agree more.
When Mike Butcher at TechCrunch broke the news that Microsoft might be trying to fund a move to persuade newspapers to move from Google to Bing, a few of us blinked not so much with surprise but more a feeling of inevitability. It took a while for the rest of the world to catch up after the Financial Times published a story (behind a paywall and 9 days later, ironically enough) stating that Microsoft had discussions involving News Corp "being paid to de-index its news websites from Google". It's also something Ron Miller, right here on DaniWeb, beat the old media to the punch with if you broaden the net a little and excuse the pun.
This all comes off the back of a Sky News interview with Rupert Murdoch during which he pointed out that readers who see News Corp news after arriving from a search page are of little value as far as its advertisers are concerned. Murdoch took the bait offered up by the Sky political editor when asked why he didn't make his sites invisible to Google in that case and responded with a curt "I think we will".
Murdoch is, as you would expect from a media mogul, looking for ways to make news pay. He has already proposed a highly controversial 'paywall' behind which premium news content should be made available only to those willing to pay for the privilege. You can do your own search for 'Murdoch Paywall' to see what the web thinks of that. My view on that, as a former Sunday Times columnist and having had some involvement in the first News Corp online venture (Delphi UK) is to say OK, go ahead. Market forces will prevail and if your news content is really worth it, Mr Murdoch, people will indeed pay and your media empire will not crumble and die before your very eyes.
Unfortunately I think that, in all honesty, you still don't get this new media Internet thing, and your advisors are not being helpful in illuminating your understanding it would seem. Otherwise why would you be demanding that headline link aggregators such as NewsNow stop linking to your stories?
The copyright infraction argument being used is a spurious one, linking is not stealing and in fact it is quite the opposite. Instead of reselling your content, Mr Murdoch, headline linking aggregators are pushing hundreds of thousands of readers to your stories, on your servers, every day. Now, if you cannot figure out a way to make money from this influx of readers then that is as a result of shortcomings in your business vision and should not be blamed on the very services which are delivering your readers to you.
There was an interesting post on Twitter over the weekend in which someone mused over whether Murdoch might start turning his attention to bloggers and try closing them down over fair use and news linking next. My immediate thought was it would be a silly thing to do, after all most newspaper journalists use blogs as an information source these days, and stories often break on the blogs first and are then 'discovered' by the newspapers and presented as their own scoop.
Which kind of brings us full circle back to Mike Butcher at TechCrunch breaking the Microsoft meeting story more than a week before the old media hacks got hold of it.
However, I am not quite done with this rant, because there is one more blog that is deserving of a mention here and that is TechDirt which has done a wonderful job in erecting a counter-argument to the news aggregators as parasites position in a story entitled "A Look At All The Sites Owned By Rupert Murdoch That 'Steal' Content" which examines Murdoch owned sites which appear to aggregate content from other sites and rely upon the fair use argument that Murdoch seems to think should be dismissed by the courts.
I'm guessing that at some point soon the tablets will kick in, the sabre will stop being rattled, and Murdoch will realise that cutting his hands off because he has a headache isn't going to solve anything. Just as cutting off Google isn't going to result in a sudden deluge of folk rushing to subscribe to News Corp content when they can simply use Google to find someone else reporting the same news, for free.
It is of Murdoch's making, and this article supports the 'fewer-but-more-valuable-users' stance:Gord Hotchkiss over at Searchnewz says "Rupert Murdoch's rantings are so out of touch that they're bordering on lunacy, or, at a minimum, stupidity. He's mad that his old revenue model isn't working anymore" and I couldn't agree more.
When Mike Butcher at TechCrunch broke the news that Microsoft might be trying to fund a move to persuade newspapers to move from Google to Bing, a few of us blinked not so much with surprise but more a feeling of inevitability. It took a while for the rest of the world to catch up after the Financial Times published a story (behind a paywall and 9 days later, ironically enough) stating that Microsoft had discussions involving News Corp "being paid to de-index its news websites from Google". It's also something Ron Miller, right here on DaniWeb, beat the old media to the punch with if you broaden the net a little and excuse the pun.
This all comes off the back of a Sky News interview with Rupert Murdoch during which he pointed out that readers who see News Corp news after arriving from a search page are of little value as far as its advertisers are concerned. Murdoch took the bait offered up by the Sky political editor when asked why he didn't make his sites invisible to Google in that case and responded with a curt "I think we will".
Murdoch is, as you would expect from a media mogul, looking for ways to make news pay. He has already proposed a highly controversial 'paywall' behind which premium news content should be made available only to those willing to pay for the privilege. You can do your own search for 'Murdoch Paywall' to see what the web thinks of that. My view on that, as a former Sunday Times columnist and having had some involvement in the first News Corp online venture (Delphi UK) is to say OK, go ahead. Market forces will prevail and if your news content is really worth it, Mr Murdoch, people will indeed pay and your media empire will not crumble and die before your very eyes.
Unfortunately I think that, in all honesty, you still don't get this new media Internet thing, and your advisors are not being helpful in illuminating your understanding it would seem. Otherwise why would you be demanding that headline link aggregators such as NewsNow stop linking to your stories?
The copyright infraction argument being used is a spurious one, linking is not stealing and in fact it is quite the opposite. Instead of reselling your content, Mr Murdoch, headline linking aggregators are pushing hundreds of thousands of readers to your stories, on your servers, every day. Now, if you cannot figure out a way to make money from this influx of readers then that is as a result of shortcomings in your business vision and should not be blamed on the very services which are delivering your readers to you.
There was an interesting post on Twitter over the weekend in which someone mused over whether Murdoch might start turning his attention to bloggers and try closing them down over fair use and news linking next. My immediate thought was it would be a silly thing to do, after all most newspaper journalists use blogs as an information source these days, and stories often break on the blogs first and are then 'discovered' by the newspapers and presented as their own scoop.
Which kind of brings us full circle back to Mike Butcher at TechCrunch breaking the Microsoft meeting story more than a week before the old media hacks got hold of it.
However, I am not quite done with this rant, because there is one more blog that is deserving of a mention here and that is TechDirt which has done a wonderful job in erecting a counter-argument to the news aggregators as parasites position in a story entitled "A Look At All The Sites Owned By Rupert Murdoch That 'Steal' Content" which examines Murdoch owned sites which appear to aggregate content from other sites and rely upon the fair use argument that Murdoch seems to think should be dismissed by the courts.
I'm guessing that at some point soon the tablets will kick in, the sabre will stop being rattled, and Murdoch will realise that cutting his hands off because he has a headache isn't going to solve anything. Just as cutting off Google isn't going to result in a sudden deluge of folk rushing to subscribe to News Corp content when they can simply use Google to find someone else reporting the same news, for free.
Mumbrella.com.au said:
Speers: “You’ve been particularly critical of what you call the ‘content kleptomaniacs and ‘the plagiarists’. Are you particularly talking about Google here?”
Murdoch: “The people who just simply pick up everything and run with it, steal our stories, just take them without payment. There’s Google, there’s Microsoft, there’s ask.com, there’s a whole lot of people.”
Speers: “Their argument is that they’re directing traffic your way, that when somebody goes to Google and searches a topic and gets a link to a news website that’s somebody who would not otherwise go to your website.”
Murdoch: “That’s right.”
Speers: ‘So isn’t it a two-way street? Aren’t they helping you?”
Murdoch: “What’s the point of having somebody come occasionally who likes a headline they see in Google? Sure we go out and say ‘hey we’ve got so many millions of visitors’ . But the fact is there’s not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all of the websites profitable. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our website but paying.”
Speers: “Isn’t it the job once they hit your website to keep them there? It’s got to be a good enough website for them to come back.”
Murdoch: “If they’re just search people and there are ten, 20, 50 references on that subject and they look through and see an interesting headline and hit that… when they click it, sure, they get a page of a story that’s in my paper. Who knows who they are or where they are? They don’t suddenly become loyal readers of our content.”
So good, so far. We’ve heard those moans from him before. But many have suggested he’s bluffing – after all – News Corp could always use the robots.txt protocol to tell Google not to index any given page. Up to now, he’s never really answered that point.
This time, he did…
Speers: The other argument from Google is that you could choose not to be on their search engine. You could simply refuse to be on so that when someone does do a search, your websites don’t come up – why haven’t you done that?”
Murdoch: “Well. I think we will. But that’s when we start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal.”
Which seemed to me to be a bit of a bombshell, that hadn’t had the attention it deserved when the interview was broadcast on Saturday.
I wrote about it on Monday, and embedded the interview, which was on the Sky News YouTube channel. (Note the irony, by the way of the fact that I got my content from a NewsCorp-affiliated TV network and then effectively aggregated it with the help of a Google-affialiated file sharing service).
After I flagged it up on Twitter, the story of Murdoch’s threat to Google was vigorously retweeted. And overnight it was picked up in the US. Among others, digital comment king Jason Calcanis linked to our story, describing it as “the biggest news of the year”. It also went big on content-discovery site Digg.
I came in the next day to find that rather than our typical weekday 7000 or so visitors, we’d had 34,570. And they’d gone from being mostly Australian to predominantly overseas on that particular tale. We had links to the story from about 40 sites, the last time I looked. Google was listing 413 related news articles. The Sky News interview had been viewed on YouTube more than 74,000 views (compared to a more typical for the channel 74)
It also generated comments in the triple figures on our story, mainly of the view that Murdoch was an ageing idiot who didn’t get it. As I say, I kind of agreed: without Google, how on earth will the world know what you’ve got? We talked about it in this week’s Mumbrella podcast.
But do you know what? Almost without exception, those fickle new readers bounced away again after looking at that one page.
The traffic was nice as far as it went. Big traffic makes you feel special (and relieved that you’d recently upgraded your server). But it also left us with something of a dilemma. Some of our advertisers are on a cpm deal, which is relatively high, justified by our specialist industry audience.
Clearly we couldn’t really justify that to local advertisers when it’s an international audience. So we decided that our cpm advertisers could have that traffic for free, and emailed them to that effect before they started querying our startling analytics for that day.
So in this case this disloyal audience was, in all practical terms, not much good for us, or our advertisers. (Although, it will be good for us in the long term for us in SEO terms of course)
But it makes me start to wonder whether Murdoch doesn’t have a point after all – not just in the direct value of a small, but paying audience, but also in the higher level of engagement this would bring to advertisers. It then becomes a conversation about engagement – and persuading advertisers of the value of that.
There is however a further flaw to Murdoch’s plan- these days, many users treat Google as their navigator and home page, even when they know what they want. For instance, if I want to see The Australian’s media section online, I’ll type those words into the Google search box on my navigator’s tool bar, then click though.
But equally, there’s nothing to say that News Ltd would apply robots.txt to every page – arguably some pages could sit, visible, the other side of the pay wall.
The move still may not work. But I do believe it is nowhere near as suicidal as many people believe.
And for the first time in the last few months, I no longer wonder if Rupert’s lost it.
Tim Burrowes
Source: http://mumbrella.com.au/shock-why-murdoch-may-be-m...Murdoch: “The people who just simply pick up everything and run with it, steal our stories, just take them without payment. There’s Google, there’s Microsoft, there’s ask.com, there’s a whole lot of people.”
Speers: “Their argument is that they’re directing traffic your way, that when somebody goes to Google and searches a topic and gets a link to a news website that’s somebody who would not otherwise go to your website.”
Murdoch: “That’s right.”
Speers: ‘So isn’t it a two-way street? Aren’t they helping you?”
Murdoch: “What’s the point of having somebody come occasionally who likes a headline they see in Google? Sure we go out and say ‘hey we’ve got so many millions of visitors’ . But the fact is there’s not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all of the websites profitable. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our website but paying.”
Speers: “Isn’t it the job once they hit your website to keep them there? It’s got to be a good enough website for them to come back.”
Murdoch: “If they’re just search people and there are ten, 20, 50 references on that subject and they look through and see an interesting headline and hit that… when they click it, sure, they get a page of a story that’s in my paper. Who knows who they are or where they are? They don’t suddenly become loyal readers of our content.”
So good, so far. We’ve heard those moans from him before. But many have suggested he’s bluffing – after all – News Corp could always use the robots.txt protocol to tell Google not to index any given page. Up to now, he’s never really answered that point.
This time, he did…
Speers: The other argument from Google is that you could choose not to be on their search engine. You could simply refuse to be on so that when someone does do a search, your websites don’t come up – why haven’t you done that?”
Murdoch: “Well. I think we will. But that’s when we start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal.”
Which seemed to me to be a bit of a bombshell, that hadn’t had the attention it deserved when the interview was broadcast on Saturday.
I wrote about it on Monday, and embedded the interview, which was on the Sky News YouTube channel. (Note the irony, by the way of the fact that I got my content from a NewsCorp-affiliated TV network and then effectively aggregated it with the help of a Google-affialiated file sharing service).
After I flagged it up on Twitter, the story of Murdoch’s threat to Google was vigorously retweeted. And overnight it was picked up in the US. Among others, digital comment king Jason Calcanis linked to our story, describing it as “the biggest news of the year”. It also went big on content-discovery site Digg.
I came in the next day to find that rather than our typical weekday 7000 or so visitors, we’d had 34,570. And they’d gone from being mostly Australian to predominantly overseas on that particular tale. We had links to the story from about 40 sites, the last time I looked. Google was listing 413 related news articles. The Sky News interview had been viewed on YouTube more than 74,000 views (compared to a more typical for the channel 74)
It also generated comments in the triple figures on our story, mainly of the view that Murdoch was an ageing idiot who didn’t get it. As I say, I kind of agreed: without Google, how on earth will the world know what you’ve got? We talked about it in this week’s Mumbrella podcast.
But do you know what? Almost without exception, those fickle new readers bounced away again after looking at that one page.
The traffic was nice as far as it went. Big traffic makes you feel special (and relieved that you’d recently upgraded your server). But it also left us with something of a dilemma. Some of our advertisers are on a cpm deal, which is relatively high, justified by our specialist industry audience.
Clearly we couldn’t really justify that to local advertisers when it’s an international audience. So we decided that our cpm advertisers could have that traffic for free, and emailed them to that effect before they started querying our startling analytics for that day.
So in this case this disloyal audience was, in all practical terms, not much good for us, or our advertisers. (Although, it will be good for us in the long term for us in SEO terms of course)
But it makes me start to wonder whether Murdoch doesn’t have a point after all – not just in the direct value of a small, but paying audience, but also in the higher level of engagement this would bring to advertisers. It then becomes a conversation about engagement – and persuading advertisers of the value of that.
There is however a further flaw to Murdoch’s plan- these days, many users treat Google as their navigator and home page, even when they know what they want. For instance, if I want to see The Australian’s media section online, I’ll type those words into the Google search box on my navigator’s tool bar, then click though.
But equally, there’s nothing to say that News Ltd would apply robots.txt to every page – arguably some pages could sit, visible, the other side of the pay wall.
The move still may not work. But I do believe it is nowhere near as suicidal as many people believe.
And for the first time in the last few months, I no longer wonder if Rupert’s lost it.
Tim Burrowes
Edited by Funk on Saturday 26th June 16:53
tinman0 said:
RYH64E said:
tinman0 said:
And if they can turn those into paying customers, then they are laughing all the way to the bank.
5% freetards vs 1.5% paying customers. I'd take the paying customers any day of the week. (Assuming the free trial will convert favourably).
How low will their market share get when you actually have to pay? I've not used the site since you had to register to view and haven't missed it at all.5% freetards vs 1.5% paying customers. I'd take the paying customers any day of the week. (Assuming the free trial will convert favourably).
Hits <> income
The fixed costs will remain the same, there will be little if any cost reduction due to reduced website traffic, and advertising revenue will definitely fall if market share declines. The gamble is whether enough people are prepared to pay to access a news site which, imo, offers nothing that isn't available elsewhere for free.
Maybe we are all missing the point, maybe the Murdoch has no interest in the websites and wants a reason to close them down, so either people pay to view in sufficient numbers or the Times website is closed. I don't really care one way or another but I think it would be a short sighted move as surely the days of paper based news distribution are numbered. When you think of the logistics involved in preparing, printing and distributing paper newspapers in comparison with the alternative of internet based news distribution it is clear what is the superior model. Many industries need to adapt to the internet age or die.
RYH64E said:
tinman0 said:
RYH64E said:
tinman0 said:
And if they can turn those into paying customers, then they are laughing all the way to the bank.
5% freetards vs 1.5% paying customers. I'd take the paying customers any day of the week. (Assuming the free trial will convert favourably).
How low will their market share get when you actually have to pay? I've not used the site since you had to register to view and haven't missed it at all.5% freetards vs 1.5% paying customers. I'd take the paying customers any day of the week. (Assuming the free trial will convert favourably).
Hits <> income
The fixed costs will remain the same, there will be little if any cost reduction due to reduced website traffic, and advertising revenue will definitely fall if market share declines. The gamble is whether enough people are prepared to pay to access a news site which, imo, offers nothing that isn't available elsewhere for free.
Maybe we are all missing the point, maybe the Murdoch has no interest in the websites and wants a reason to close them down, so either people pay to view in sufficient numbers or the Times website is closed. I don't really care one way or another but I think it would be a short sighted move as surely the days of paper based news distribution are numbered. When you think of the logistics involved in preparing, printing and distributing paper newspapers in comparison with the alternative of internet based news distribution it is clear what is the superior model. Many industries need to adapt to the internet age or die.
The Times is making a loss, website or no website, ad revenue or no ad revenue. And the newspaper side is definitely making a loss.
He has nothing to lose.
Funk said:
Why not just shut down the paper and websites then if they're haemorrhaging cash?
Because they are seeing if the subscription model works as a guess. The brand will be pensioned or sold if it continues to make a loss. I'm sure Murdoch is far from sentimental when it comes to loss making parts of his business.
I've been linked there twice since the paywall went up and I have left the site twice..
Pretty sure that if I cared enough google would have a cache of the entire site which I could look through.
Stupidest idea in the history of ideas.. This only works on sites that actually offer premium news to people that are willing to pay.
So essentially it works for The Financial Times...
What a screw up.
Pretty sure that if I cared enough google would have a cache of the entire site which I could look through.
Stupidest idea in the history of ideas.. This only works on sites that actually offer premium news to people that are willing to pay.
So essentially it works for The Financial Times...
What a screw up.
The pundits recon that most of the other big players are eying up The Times project with a view to doing something similar.
So ultimately consumers might be left with a choice of who's spin they want on their news. However news services don't grow on trees so if it's the only way some ordinations can survive then so be it. Or perhaps we will see broadband bundles including a news subscription from one company or other thrown in.
So ultimately consumers might be left with a choice of who's spin they want on their news. However news services don't grow on trees so if it's the only way some ordinations can survive then so be it. Or perhaps we will see broadband bundles including a news subscription from one company or other thrown in.
Edited by colonel c on Friday 2nd July 10:26
Edited by colonel c on Friday 2nd July 10:27
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