I hope he carries through with this threat, because only actually doing it will provide hard evidence on who loses the most on this type of action: the content producer, or the content aggregator.
I think that News Corp will be the biggest loser, and I think it would be really good if they got to learn this lesson the hard way, but I also think the people in the blogosphere banging their chests and proclaiming the final demise of Old Media are wrong, yet again.
Only actually doing it will provide hard evidence on who loses the most on this type of action: the content producer, or the content aggregator
If I was a betting man I would put my money on Murdoch loosing money. This is what happens when some CEO who doesn't know anything about how the web or how search works goes on a rampage. I wonder if Murdoch even knows what a browser is. (Reference to Google's "What is a browser?" video series.)
Edit:
I was just laughing while watching the video. Murdoch didn't even use YouTube's name. He said "that, that huge video site that was such a runaway success." What I get out of it is he's just jealous of Google. I bet he wants to buy them out and add them to his portfolio.
I doubt the content aggregator will lose much of anything by this happening. What this will be a test of is how dependent content sites are on aggregators, or if there are enough alternate ways for them to attract traffic that they don't need any specific aggregator (Google).
And if the other traffic sources are better at delivering higher value traffic, then they may even gain from it.
I think you're absolutely right, and it would be interesting (though impossible) to see this same thing happen with piracy and music industry. If there were a way to stop piracy and see how much the music industry sales dropped (assuming that they would), I wonder if they would get the picture.
What makes everyone think they haven't done a lifetime ROI analysis and discovered that search referals aren't profitable ? - the only thing we have is speculation. What Murdoch has is hard data about visitors and ad-click through rates. I'm willing to bet they have a much better understanding of the value of search referals than anyone here.
Going pay-only is a risky strategy, everyone knows that, but the only way they'll know if it works if they do it. Business isn't always about accepting the status quo, sometimes you have to gamble.
Sure you have to gamble, but the only way this will make money for Murdoch is if makes less money on people who comes to his site from a search than it costs to serve that page; unless he has gotten the worst bandwidth-deal of the century.
When Murdch originally bought the WSJ he said he would bring the pay walls down on WSJ.com:
"(WSJ.com) is an excellent site but we charge for it, which limits it to about a million in circulation. We are studying and we expect to make that free, and instead of having a million, having 10 or 15 million people in every corner of the earth keeping up to date minute by minute with all business and economic news from around the world. We think that will attract very large sums or, relatively large sums, anyway of advertising revenue."
I think this just may improve the quality of news on the internet! Hopefully more independent news outlets with forward thinking mindsets can take advantage of the reduced noise and actually start to put out material that will be of a better quality. Perhaps we will start to see more journalism from around the world with different points of view? more individual journalists and blogs with relevant and accurate information for a change.
I for one hope he does go through with this!! I think its just going to end up hurting his core business more...which is a good thing really. He is just accelerating the demise of the paper/tabloid and big media as we know it.
I think a lot of people will have a different opinion, but I think this is great news.
Vaporplan? As far as I'm concerned, when a business leader says their company might do something, it's as good as not saying anything at all. Even when they say they will do something, they often change their minds.
His idea than random surfers are worthless to advertisers seems very odd to me.
I'd think that the random surfers are MORE likely to click an ad. After all, they aren't committed to your site -- They got there by accident. If a related ad is there, it seems likely that they would follow it more readily than someone who went to that site specifically to get their news.
I can attest to this from my own personal website building experience. I have found that random people are much more likely to click on ads. Amazon product ads are very effective with random search engine users.
I'm confused about something. I thought newspapermen (Murdoch and that AP guy in particular) had a problem with news aggregators, which to me means things like Google News and Digg and HN, and maybe even RSS/Atom readers. Are they actually mad about having links to content from Google results pages? Or is there some misunderstanding here?
To understand Murdoch's motivations, you must realize that the man has a true love for the printed word, especially in newsprint form. The only thing that makes sense to me here is that he is intentionally sabotaging the internet to make his beloved newspapers more appealing. It's not going to work, but bless his heart for trying.
This man runs his news(!) organizations to spread his personal ideologies as opposed to actually providing news. The only thing he really cares about is maximizing profit (nothing wrong with that), to say that his action was a result of his love for printed media is pretty silly, really.
Perhaps he has, in fact almost certainly. (btw sp: referers(sic), yes it's not referrers!)
Some fictitious scenarios:
1) they give away the news, only ad revenue from 100% of current readers who are mostly too cheap to pay (that's me!)
2) they sell the news to 5% of current readers, targetted ad revenue doesn't alter as these readers buy stuff, and buy stuff online to boot
I'm going to go ahead and assume that most people come to the prestige newspapers The Times (of London) by a search for the papers name - now they're not going to delist themselves just stop putting all their stories up online. Indeed I'd expect them to have lead summaries still in SERPs. If most paying customers and most ad following customers come via the reputation and not specific stories then it seems there's little to lose.
Even if it works but not as well as liked it's only going to work better if more news centres follow suit - the less freely available well written news online the greater the value of pay news (and the less they'll need to charge).
Personally I think Murdoch can probably pull this off for some of his larger news providers - do I like it, not one bit.
Would you say many businesses in the new-media internet sector are equally oblivious to viable and sustainable revenue models?
Seems to be a gross sense of entitlement amongst consumers if you ask me. It kills off quality content providers in favor or knee-jerk social media and mediocre content generated by algorithms to maximize SEO/SEM juju.
My point is, there are two sides to this coin and somewhere in between is a happy medium. I don't feel either side has the best solution — yet.
dito, it's really his funeral, I guess they won't really do it, he obviously doesn't know what he's talking about, he'll find it out soon enought to change his mind.
personally, I would be willing to pay for news content. However I do not want to subscribe to NY Times, and wall street journal, and Forbes, etc I read articles from all these sites on a daily basis but I would hate to have to pay $100 a month in subscription fees... i wouldn't.
>personally, I would be willing to pay for news content.
That makes you an exceptional case. Most North Americans haven't paid for news content in well over a century. Since the advent of advertising-based newspapers, we've paid for distribution, but not the content itself.
[+] [-] henrikschroder|16 years ago|reply
I think that News Corp will be the biggest loser, and I think it would be really good if they got to learn this lesson the hard way, but I also think the people in the blogosphere banging their chests and proclaiming the final demise of Old Media are wrong, yet again.
[+] [-] NathanKP|16 years ago|reply
If I was a betting man I would put my money on Murdoch loosing money. This is what happens when some CEO who doesn't know anything about how the web or how search works goes on a rampage. I wonder if Murdoch even knows what a browser is. (Reference to Google's "What is a browser?" video series.)
Edit:
I was just laughing while watching the video. Murdoch didn't even use YouTube's name. He said "that, that huge video site that was such a runaway success." What I get out of it is he's just jealous of Google. I bet he wants to buy them out and add them to his portfolio.
[+] [-] albertsun|16 years ago|reply
And if the other traffic sources are better at delivering higher value traffic, then they may even gain from it.
[+] [-] megamark16|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timf|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ig1|16 years ago|reply
Going pay-only is a risky strategy, everyone knows that, but the only way they'll know if it works if they do it. Business isn't always about accepting the status quo, sometimes you have to gamble.
[+] [-] tomjen2|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SlyShy|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _pius|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biznerd|16 years ago|reply
When Murdch originally bought the WSJ he said he would bring the pay walls down on WSJ.com:
"(WSJ.com) is an excellent site but we charge for it, which limits it to about a million in circulation. We are studying and we expect to make that free, and instead of having a million, having 10 or 15 million people in every corner of the earth keeping up to date minute by minute with all business and economic news from around the world. We think that will attract very large sums or, relatively large sums, anyway of advertising revenue."
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-nws-dj-murdoch-we-expect-...
I'm very curious to see what convinced him to do a complete 180. It was only two years ago when he made that statement.
[+] [-] metatronscube|16 years ago|reply
I for one hope he does go through with this!! I think its just going to end up hurting his core business more...which is a good thing really. He is just accelerating the demise of the paper/tabloid and big media as we know it.
I think a lot of people will have a different opinion, but I think this is great news.
[+] [-] assemble|16 years ago|reply
Journalism isn't supposed to have a point of view. It's supposed to give you the facts and stay neutral.
[+] [-] DanielStraight|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joezydeco|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] synnik|16 years ago|reply
I'd think that the random surfers are MORE likely to click an ad. After all, they aren't committed to your site -- They got there by accident. If a related ad is there, it seems likely that they would follow it more readily than someone who went to that site specifically to get their news.
[+] [-] amalcon|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NathanKP|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stanleydrew|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rms|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavs|16 years ago|reply
This man runs his news(!) organizations to spread his personal ideologies as opposed to actually providing news. The only thing he really cares about is maximizing profit (nothing wrong with that), to say that his action was a result of his love for printed media is pretty silly, really.
[+] [-] j_baker|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timothychung|16 years ago|reply
I don't see any point of trying to threaten Google. Just be a man, mate, the Aussie way.
[+] [-] macmac|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|16 years ago|reply
Some fictitious scenarios:
1) they give away the news, only ad revenue from 100% of current readers who are mostly too cheap to pay (that's me!)
2) they sell the news to 5% of current readers, targetted ad revenue doesn't alter as these readers buy stuff, and buy stuff online to boot
I'm going to go ahead and assume that most people come to the prestige newspapers The Times (of London) by a search for the papers name - now they're not going to delist themselves just stop putting all their stories up online. Indeed I'd expect them to have lead summaries still in SERPs. If most paying customers and most ad following customers come via the reputation and not specific stories then it seems there's little to lose.
Even if it works but not as well as liked it's only going to work better if more news centres follow suit - the less freely available well written news online the greater the value of pay news (and the less they'll need to charge).
Personally I think Murdoch can probably pull this off for some of his larger news providers - do I like it, not one bit.
[+] [-] klon|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pxlpshr|16 years ago|reply
Seems to be a gross sense of entitlement amongst consumers if you ask me. It kills off quality content providers in favor or knee-jerk social media and mediocre content generated by algorithms to maximize SEO/SEM juju.
My point is, there are two sides to this coin and somewhere in between is a happy medium. I don't feel either side has the best solution — yet.
[+] [-] petervandijck|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elblanco|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Concours|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jong|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] clistctrl|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyanMcGreal|16 years ago|reply
That makes you an exceptional case. Most North Americans haven't paid for news content in well over a century. Since the advent of advertising-based newspapers, we've paid for distribution, but not the content itself.