Paying for your news
Last week, Rupert Murdoch
announced his plans to introduce pay-walls on his news websites,
which include the Sun, News of the World and the Times.
This is an attempt to combat the
falling circulation of hard copies of the papers, not to mention
falling advertising revenues, as more people get their news online
and, for the time being at least, for free.
I'm not sure whether charging
for online news would work. As pointed out in Shane Richmond's
piece from the Telegraph website, people are not prepared to pay
when there is a free alternative of sufficient - crucially, not
necessarily equal - quality.
So if people don't fancy paying
for the Sun online, they can go the Mirror online for free,
likewise with the Times and any other broadsheet.
Richmond's
argument, that
we've never paid for news, only print and distribution costs,
and that journalists' salaries have been funded by advertising,
may be true but it isn't a business
model that can be transferred to online news.
Whilst news
websites may get millions of hits per day, the ad revenue generated
from the small and largely unobtrusive banner adverts they use
would fall significantly short of covering the cost of producing
all that content, which is, as Richmond points out, covered by the ad revenue
from the print version.
It is an interesting issue but it
seems the industry is almost in a catch-22 situation where people don't
want to pay for online news, but likewise don't want to buy the
newspapers that fund the news.
But we will soon see how this
problem pans out if Murdoch realises his ambition of having
pay-walls on the Sun and News of the World by next
summer.
COMMENTS
No comments added for this entry.
POST A COMMENT
