here i sit emitting pointless blather and someone has the nerve to try and make me pay for it

Murdoch to charge for online content. Says Jeff Jarvis:

Charging for content brings marketing and customer-service costs. Online, it reduces audience and the advertising they justify. Putting content behind a wall cuts it off from search and links; they cut off your Googlejuice.

When publishers build those walls, they open the door for free competitors, who can now enter the content business with virtually no barrier to entry. Publishers who fool themselves into thinking pay will save the day only further forestall the innovation and experimentation that is the only possible path to success online.

Googlejuice my arse. I find it difficult to read much of Jarvis, but in my experience he never tells you where the actual money is supposed to come from. He’s the kind of techno liberal who thinks that venture capital fairies come in the night to stock up your refrigerator, which in his case they probably do: them and the innovation pixies and experimentation sprites. You know where you stand with Rupert. Not got any money? Then fuck off.

Will it work? If Murdoch can get everybody else to come along with him, maybe. And then…it’s the end of political blogging as we know it. “Amateur political bloggers to charge for content.” Now that really would be a funny headline.

If they do all do start, I'm going to try to have the blog decalred a listed building and see if the National Trust will pay me a wage to manage it. After all, I am maintaining a kind of folly here.

Comments

[Alex]

Doesn't worry me all that much; more time to use for the trade press, thinktankia, journals etc, and probably more worthwhile. Anyway, there is nothing with a shorter shelf life than one of Rupert's annual "I've discovered the Internet" speeches.

More practically, how the hell is he going to salami slice pricing the Scum? It's 20p a throw already!

[Chris Williams]

You need to get a 2* if you want grants to maintain; a simple 2 won't cut it. And its English Heritage not the NT.

And with 2*, it would be a bugger to change the CSS. Proper 'Early Noughties', it be - you don't see many of those about nowadays.

Content? You think it's about _content_? Hah! Keep the facade there and the art historians will be happy.

Yes folks, I _do_ help to manage a listed building - did you guess?

[john b]

If Murdoch can get everybody else to come along with him, maybe.

For that to happen, you'd need the Tories to abolish BBC Online, and GMG to continue losing money group-wide next year ('possible but unlikely' and 'possible but very unlikely', respectively).

[Charlie]

"When we have a celebrity scoop, the number of hits we get now are astronomical."

Says Murdoch. A man who thinks it's OK to ask you to watch ads on pay TV. I think the explanation is just that he's unusually greedy, even going by the standards of his sort.

I say this with the admission that sometimes I read my wife's Grazia, but I think that what you'll get here, if anything, is a further segregation of media consumers. You'll get people who want to read about celebrities (there's clearly some psychological aspect to people that drives celebrity interest along) and they might be persuaded to pay. Otherwise they'll read the Metro etc. And there might be a few other widely shared interests, such as sport. Political blogging won't be affected negatively; why would it? Where will political bloggers get their material? Well, politicians have at least some interest in being heard. In the UK, even if all newspapers went paywall, you'd still have Radio 4 and suchlike.

And I suppose that Googlejuice is what leads to advertising juice.

This was a fairly smart take on the situation, I thought.

[dsquared]

I will apply for the job of being the National Trust bureaucrat who scrutinises every new post to make sure that it's in keeping with the overall aesthetic.

[Chris Williams]

English Heritage. It's English Heritage. RTFC, D2.

[Tom]

"Well, politicians have at least some interest in being heard."

Yes, this was my second thought. My first was 'oh noes, we'll be forced to rely on original sources and finding our own material tucked away on Government websites and the like'.

[jamie]

Hey, I'm not having any of this new fangled "English Heritage" stuff round here. If the National Trust was good enough for the people who wrote the Magna Carta, then it's good enough for me.

[movealongnothingtoseehere]

what is it in Wales?

[Sunny]

Yeah, what john b said. I have a feeling however that the Guardian may go along with it.

[Phil]

Treftadaeth Saesneg. HTH.

[ajay]

Treftadaeth Saesneg

Bless you.

[Tim Worstall]

Reports today that he's going to start with the Sunday Times.

As has been mentioned before elsewhere, who is actually going to cough up real cash to read India Knight online?

[Alex]

As both I and Dsquared say, however, if this is less-than-whole-paper charging, how the fuck do you make money from splitting 20p worth of Sun into chunks after even PayPal or Google Checkout fees? Even £1.40 of Sunderer isn't going to be easy.

Also, I don't think anyone noticed this bit in the speech:
Quality journalism isn't cheap, which is why we have no plans to supply it.

Yes, I made part of that up.

[Richard J]

It's slightly depressing to watch Murdoch make exactly the same mistake as the record companies (ominous threats about defending copyright etc.), but tant pis.

Oh, while I remember.

Paras 68-102 in this are surprisingly interesting.

http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2006/SPC00561.html

[Alex]

It's slightly depressing to watch Murdoch make exactly the same mistake as the record companies (ominous threats about defending copyright etc.), but tant pis.

I disagree. Who was it who said that you should never interrupt the enemy while he's making a mistake?

[john b]

Sunny: GMG only exists to disseminate the Guardian (that's its sole legal function, in the same way that News International's sole legal function is to make money), so I can't see it putting paywalls on.

Alex: PAYG, load a fiver onto your Sunderer account, then read pieces at 5p a shot? I'm not convinced it'd work (ie I'm pretty sure it wouldn't), but it gets rid of the transaction processing costs.

[Richard J]

It's a bit like an inevitable tragedy - even if you don't like the players much, you can't help but feel some slight sympathy.

Mind, even back in the glory days of 2007, they were keeping profits afloat only by jacking up the cover price, and praying that online advertising would fill in the gap - I happened to be at a meeting where the FD admitted this...

Looks like it ain't happening - the PE report on the Sunday Times making a loss seems plausible, which is alarming, as it was always the really steady cash cow of the group.

[Chris Williams]

"even if you don't like the players much, you can't help but feel some slight sympathy."

Er, no.

[Richard J]

I'm just a big softie, it appears.

[Chris Williams]

This is _News International_ we're talking about. OK, it's not Northcliffe Media - if it were, I'd be getting the closure order sorted for the street party already.

[Richard J]

I can agree with that... Murdoch always earns a small degree of grudging respect for being honest about being a billionaire tyrant.

[dsquared]

[PAYG, load a fiver onto your Sunderer account, then read pieces at 5p a shot? I'm not convinced it'd work (ie I'm pretty sure it wouldn't), but it gets rid of the transaction processing costs.]

gets rid of them by lumping them onto News International, though, doesn't it? It would still have to maintain a secure payments infrastructure which would cost money, plus there is the massive one-off problem of how you persuade all your web readers to part with the five quid up front (BitPass used to work like this, but basically hit the rocks). iTunes can sort of make a model like this work, but they've got the iPod device to solve the problem of getting the installed base.

[jamie]

I suspect what the Sun may do is offer more behind a paywall, notably tits and betting. What's interesting is that the issue seems gradually to be forcing the question of what exactly people are paying for when they buy a newspaper. So I suppose what could happen is that newspapes become information services companies.

Think of the Mail in those circumstances. It's profited from the fact that mean spirited self-righteousness is apparently infinite. But what happens if it needs to ration it to subscribers?

[dsquared]

Tits and betting are available for free on my internet though?

[Martin Wisse]

Yes, but a lot of internet thickies have to depend on the good graces of the established media.

[Chris Williams]

Mean spirited self-righteousness might not be infinite. Some insiders claim that Peak MSS-R was already reached in the US and Australia in 2007/8, and the global peak is likely to be far sooner than we think.

[Richard J]

Unfortunately, the reservoirs of MSS-R are like that alternative theory about where oil comes from - they refill over time. Just a lot quicker.

[Richard J]

d^2 has a good point though. Tits, bingo and celebrity gossip aren't something the internet's exactly short of.

Come to think of it, given the symbiotic relationship between the tabs and the type of celebrity exemplified by Jordan, this may actually be good news for civilisation as a whole. It's always seemed like a very unstable equilibrium.

[Alex]

Unfortunately, recent experiments in the US suggest that it is far easier to produce synthetic MSS-R on an industrial scale than previously thought.

Regarding gambling, firms like Betfair already ripped the guts out of the market, and I really don't see what the Scum has that it could charge for there. And tits? It's surprising Page 3 has survived so long, now that even the readers who don't have computers have mobile phones with Web browsers. I suspect that one of the reasons is that stopping would look like giving in.

[jamie]

"I suspect that one of the reasons is that stopping would look like giving in."

Come to think of it, Chippendale and Horrie were saying that as far back as stick it up your punter. I dunno. A few years ago they could have done Sun branded tits and betting with some hope of success. But now I guess it's all blown open.

[Richard J]

Actually, the fixed-odds betting on the Sun site (i.e. Bingo) was one of the main digital revenue sources...