I wouldn’t pay anything for his crap, anyway.

Not meaning to be vulgar but trying to charge those online for news content is exactly the same as trying to charge for pornography online nowadays – a huge waste of time.

Rupert may have been king of the printing press but when it comes to the internet it’s becoming clear as day he knows nothing at all.

Against £365 for the Times alone it makes the TVL look a real bargain.

Own goal I think.

OK.

I’ll pay for this and mirror the site at 50p a day.

Any interest?

Thought not.

Anything which reduces Murdoch’s consumer base is always welcome. Thanks, Rupe!

If only the ‘phwoaraway’ Sun could be persuaded to follow suit…?

You really need to look at this story.

Newsday’s attempt to drum up Wall Street Journal-style paying subscribers for its website has turned into a comedy far beyond the failure of The New York Times’ TimesSelect. Newsday’s $4 million redesign launched last October forced visitors to sign up for a subscription to read Newsday online. The price for an online-only subscription: $5 a week.

The number of people who’ve signed up in the past three months? 35.

Murdoch is obviously losing it. Which is great news.

Next thing he’s going to buy Netscape and take over VHS-making factories around the world. Way to go, Murdoch.

Best news I have heard in Months…His profiteering will suffer…and the only people who will lose money, are him…and the few idiots who buy his drivel

As long as you look at this from Murdoch’s POV it makes perfect sense. He has no interest in the number of readers of his news material, purely how much money they bring in. I don’t know the figures, but lets say their website currently attracts 10M readers, who each earn him 1p from advertising rates. If he can get 100,000 paying subscribers at £1 each then that is the same profit for him. Presumably they are hoping for more than that so it will be more profitable.

Personally I think they’ll struggle to even cover the costs of their servers. I’m sure there are a small minority of Times website users who will pay for this service, but the vast majority of users will be casual readers, and they will just stop looking at the Times website. I would probably pay for access to the Guardian for instance, but most people wouldn’t.

Always remember that Murdoch is a capitalist, pure and simple.

Murdoch may be a capitalist an’ all that but that fundamentals are that circulation of the mainstream printed press is falling and many of the titles are running losses. Something will have to change. Some titles – like the London Evening Standard – have switched to free newspapers but that’s hardly an option for all titles at risk.

£100 a year for access to both papers? Seems a bit toppy really.

The problem with subscription barriers is that you lose all of the traffic driven by linking to pieces. Or, you do what the NY Times is said to be thinking of and allowing visitors arriving by links to see the page linked to. Which makes your barrier extremely porous.

Which might, in fact, be no bad thing at all. Get revenue from those willing to pay and then let the others unwilling to pay find their way through the gaps and get their eyeball money anyway.

Customer segregation is where it’s at after all.

I hope this brings an element of the bastards empire down, I also hope it fails horribly but will watch with interest to see what the uptake is here.

Next, I hope, is the Scum.

The only thing we demand from Murdoch is for him to die, at long last.

That puts the people at Tabloid Lies in a bit of a quandry doesn’t it? They’ll now have to fund the Murdoch Papers directly in order to tell us about its great many abuses.

That puts the people at Tabloid Lies in a bit of a quandry doesn’t it? They’ll now have to fund the Murdoch Papers directly in order to tell us about its great many abuses.

Or nip down their local library…

14/15

Nah, it’s only the Times that’s being paywalled!

Laban @ 6

You might care to look at this story, pointing out that since access to the news site is included with cable subscriptions provided by its parent company, the fact that 35 people who didn’t have the cable subscription paid for the news site only is kind of beside the point and misleading in suggesting actual numbers of readers or desire to pay for news.

In fact, since they could also get access to the news site free with a print subscription that would cost them less ($5 a week versus $4.50) any number greater than one of online-only subscribers isn’t just unsurprising, it’s amazing.

Note that website access is free for the Murdoch papers if you have a print sub. Bets on access to Murdoch news sites being free with Sky?

Tim Worstall @ 11 – the leakiness of paywalls may be a sort of versioning of information goods – http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/version.pdf as noted by Nick Carr. Also, I’d question just how valuable all those links from blogs and Twitter actually are – I remember seeing something about how readers from links don’t tend to hang around on the site once they’ve read the linked story.
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/01/the_delayed_lea.php

Cheaper and better than the BBC though.

Besides Murdoch or not, the fundamentals can’t be ignored. Too many mainstream press titles are losing circulation and running losses. Something has to change.

Try Robert Peston’s blog on the BBC website for insights into the predicament of the mainstream press:

“Now we have a financial measure of the mayhem in the newspaper industry: the Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev is being paid £9.25m to take the Independent off the hands of the existing owners, the Irish newspaper group, Independent News & Media. My reaction has been melancholy. . . Here is the sum that makes it a good deal . .: the cost of closing the Indie, in respect of payments to staff and to the paper’s printers and distributor – notably Trinity Mirror – would have been £30m; so getting shot of it at a cost of £9.25m is a bargain. . . Over many years – and with the exception of the FT, which is in a special market, and the Telegraph – quality papers have found it close to impossible to bring revenues and costs into equilibrium, let alone generate a sustainable profit margin.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/03/indie_lebedev_paid_to_take_it.html

I won’t be happy to see a subscription fee. The Times is worth looking at as much as any other British newspaper.

I was glad when the Independent dropped theirs – and the New York Times too, as otherwise I’d have missed a lot of interesting stuff.

I’m still miffed that the Irish site Forth became subscription based.
http://forth.ie/

I endorse comments 12 and 13. We need for Murdoch’s papers to croak it, then for him to go to the great newspaper oligarch’s saloon in Hell, then hopefully Rebekah Wade can get run over by a car. The world will be a better place.

wow, people wish death on a guy for owning a couple of newspapers. srsly, that’s cold

Consumers will pay a subscription for content that has value. Therefore, subscription works for the FT and WSJ. I would be very surprised if they will pay for news content as the news is easily accessible elsewhere. I subscribe to the FT but would not give Murdoch a subscription for the WSJ. It is easy to read his WSJ content for free by just copying and pasting the headline of the story into google and that gets around the registration paywall.

While its fun to crow at them possible demise of Rupe I think Bob B has hit the proverbial nail.

Bloggers aren’t the same as proper journos if I’m not mistaken. Don’t look at what the papers are, consider what they were and should be. Quality investigative journalism needs dedicated staff and resources. If Rupe can revive print journalism then probably for the only time in my life I’ll salute him.

I agree with some of the arguments against charging for access, but surely we are missing the point? Murdoch, for all his predatory instincts, has been continually been at the top of his game. It will only be a matter of time before other newspapers (and may I say blogs) start to follow suit.

23, might I ask where the fuck you were in the 80s when scum like Murdoch were cheering on the state’s assault on working-class livelihoods? When Thatcher made every social problem far worse and broke Britain?

When they threw me and millions of other people out of jobs, cheered on by the right-wing press, did you whinge about people being “cold” then? Or is it ok when conservatives do it?

If you don’t understand why people hate tabloid “newspapers”, you’re no fucking use to anyone.

Personally? I don’t hope he dies, I hope hope him and his heroine Thatcher live on, in physical and mental agony, as their whole fucking rotten edifice collapses. Let’s have a real left government that, unlike these shitheads in office now, has actually learnt the lessons of 2008.

Actually, the main idea behind this is rather simple… think about this- he does THIS… lets it run for a while and then says he is losing money because of the BBC- and tries to get either all BBC content removed and/or the BBC removed.
Silly you say?
Not really.
It is News International that is the source of all those nonsense stories that suggests Facebook/You Tube/iPlayer are ‘causing traffic jams on the internet’ that they reprint every three months or so… when the BBC/ITV and C4 tried to expand the iPlayer to include ALL their content for free, NI moved and had it stopped as it would prevent them introducing Hulu to the UK market (why watch for free when you can PAY to watch it hey?).

Murdoch and co are basically seeing that the world that is coming works does not work the way the world worked in the past- the most succesful websites on Earth are free to use, and make billions, but News International have decided that they are going to turn the clock back AND force the clock to be turned back for another 30 years or so if they can.

Wanna know the weird thing? If this was a company owned by an Arab or an African, the Mail etc would be screaming blue murder about foreign owned companies coming in with foreign values (for example the American model of broadcasting) and attacking British culture (aka in the 1920′s we openly and deliberatly decided that the American broadcasting model was not suited for us) and demanding we stop it.
But since he is a white Aussie no one complains I take it.

The Times and the Sun we must see as part of a GLOBAL effort for him. The New York Post and other right wing news rags in the states will be able to acess it, as well as Sky and above all FOX subscribers in the states. Now add this to unlimited 20th century Fox film back catalogue and guess what? he has an attarctive little offer there.

just so long as no one like the BBC keeps offering content for free it should make a killing!

Damn those British! How DARE THEY not just copy the American model of broadcasting!!!??

One of the great unwritten sub-plots to election 2010 is that Murdoch is tottering in the middle of the ring. The British electorate could take him out with one sucker punch.

The guy has all his organs shilling for the Tories – yet still the Tory lead falls. The Sun’s hectoring at its readers to vote for Cameron gets ever more wildly hysterical with every daily Yougov Poll.

If the Tories fail to gain a majority by 7th May, as looks increasingly likely, the suffocating noose of Murdoch influence around the neck of British politics could at last be lifted.

Obama has kneed Murdoch in the groin with his Healthcare victory. Australians karate chopped him by ignoring hysterical Liberal Party AGW deniers and xenophobes. Centre Left British voters could deliver the knockout blow!

BreakthePaywall! is a free add-on for Internet Explorer (Firefox coming soon!) that simplifies using the various methods for circumventing website paywall restrictions.