Charging for online access

From June anyone wanting to read The Times or The Sunday Times online will have to pay £1 a day or £2 a week for the privilege. The Sun and The News Of The World will follow with their own charges. A good idea by Mr Murdoch to charge for his content or just a way of losing visitors/readers and therefore advertising revenue?

It's a sure fire way of losing at least one reader. Well, potential reader at any rate (I loathe Murdoch's papers and refuse to watch either one of his news channels as well). Why on earth would I want to pay for access to a newspaper site, when I can read the BBC, Reuters, or any one of a hundred other news sites for free? Murdoch and his family are lodged permanently in the 80's business model of grab the customer, pick them up by the ankles and shake them until the change falls out of their pockets. This is going to cost them dearly, in the long run.

News was a great way to make money, up until about 15 years ago when the web took off in a big way in the US, with the rest of the world following suit soon after. Unless you provide a tangible, physical object via mail order, the internet has a wildly different money making model from that of traditional media, something old media stalwarts are struggling to come to grips with. I very much doubt it will be a success, firstly because people are naturally very reluctant to pay for a service they've received free for a number of years and secondly, because people don't like paying for information. No matter how much the intellect may tell you information is a commodity like any other, the instinct says you're paying for something that should be free. Newspapers only bridged that gap because of the physical nature of the medium, I honestly think people will baulk at paying to access information that's easily available for free elsewhere.

(27-03-2010 19:50 )Mister Gummidge Wrote:  I honestly think people will baulk at paying to access information that's easily available for free elsewhere.

I completely agree with that. I knew this was going to happen, as I read this article last year. Hopefully this idea will die on its arse.

Got to disagree guys.

Murdoch might not benefit from being at the cutting edge but the current models for providing news content for free via advertising revenue aren't sustainable

It's okay you saying you can get news for free right now but it's been in the pipeline for a while now with providers toying with premium schemes as somebody has to pay for the reporters.

I suspect MS/Bing will be at the head of the queue for offering it's search services for the providers sites as well seeing as it is Google effectively that has forced this issue by using it's search engine to give access to news without visiting the original content provider