Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation’s newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a ”malfunctioning” business model.
Encouraged by booming online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal, the billionaire media mogul last night said that papers were going through an “epochal” debate over whether to charge. “That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal’s experience,” he said.
Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, he replied: “We’re absolutely looking at that.” Taking questions on a conference call with reporters and analysts, he said that moves could begin “within the next 12 months‚” adding: “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”
#28 for the win
#29 should be included in a Dvorak Hall of Fame of worst, uneducated posts ever
To #29, if you are talking about news, most of it is AP or Reuters and franchised cartoons. If you are talking about something other than news, well, then you are talking about something other than whether the pay-for-news model is still viable in 2009.
Does any of these fucking neener-neener trash talkers ever get up from their fat asses and make the news?
What do you mean by make the news? Do you mean report the news? Just because someone is not a journalist means that they have to sit back, hand over their money, and take it?
Do they invest time and fuel to go places to take notes and pictures of what is going on, come back and write a piece?
That assumes that just because you are spending time and energy doing something it is worth doing. A large percentage of what newspapers do is not, in my opinion, worth doing. Why do they have sports sections when I have half a dozen sports channels on my television? Why do they report yesterday’s news when I can watch it happening live on 3 (4 if you count Headline News) 24 hour news channels and broadcast network news.
Do they ever fund and incorporate companies and run staff to keep a media organization chugging along?
This is assuming that having a company and staff is worthwhile.
Do they pay any salaries to the people who make the news?again, I am assuming you mean report the news, but that assumes that just because you are paying people it is a good thing.
Do they support expensive logistics and machinery to maintain the broadcast?
Maintain the broadcast? I don’t know of any commercial free broadcast news outlets in the USA so I don’t know what you are talking about here.
The New York Times has a subscriber fee to read their articles. Hmmm, I wonder How that is working out for them?
Well, the NYTimes is now close to bankruptcy with $1.3 billion in debt and only $34 million in liquid funds that are not already earmarked for other expenses:
http://tinyurl.com/cg5xdl
This was reported just a couple of weeks ago. I guess Murdoch doesn’t read the news. Either that or he doesn’t think that what has happened to the NYTimes can happen to him.
NO AGENDA
dvorak.org/na
Flatware (maybe) included!
#30: “Does any of these fucking neener-neener trash talkers ever get up from their fat asses and make the news?”
My guess is that Luc expects these “trash talkers” to go where there’s a video camera trained on their face, and do something to make sure it gets reported on by someone else, and that we can then pay to see it. You know, places like convenience stores, banks, or gas stations. Maybe do handstands, candid camera segments à la “Just for Laughs”, run a charity car wash, pull a gun on the cashier… you know. Interesting things that make the news.
Thought about my point earlier that RMs operations are garbage but for direct tv, I was wrong.
FX is a great producer of original drama, on near-peer status with HBO. “The Shield”, “Damages”, and “Sons of Anarchy” are all remarkable. Shield and Sons might come in second in cop show and Shakespeare influenced to “The Wire” and “Rome”, but they are easily in the top 100 shows ever made.
Damages is quite extraordinary. Not a legal procedural show like Law & Order, I’d put this at the very top of the genre.
Shield and Wire is an argument as to the viewer’s tastes. Different purposes, both outstanding.
Long live FX. I’ll buy the box sets, but I still don’t think cable or satellite TV is worth the cost.
I can’t put it in the bottom of my bird cage.
Ok. Charge for content. But, what is a fair price? I believe in today’s multiple mass markets, content providers have the opportunity to reach vast numbers of customers and thus the incremental cost of products approach zero. The situation as it stands now, is one in which consumers are increasingly refusing to pay the greedy content providers more than is fair. Does anyone think that Rupert Murdoch isn’t already rich enough? Do content providers have the right to make unlimited amounts of money? How about Bill Gates? I live in Japan and the cost for one box of Windows off the retail shelf is $500. That is more than the cost of the pc that I built. I’m sorry. That is unreasonable. I know that there are shareholders involved. But, expecting a reasonable return and expecting maximum returns at all costs are different animals. Which is proper? Not to mention moral hazard. Does anyone think that Rupert Murdoch really answers to his shareholders? It is his own personal empire. Sure, some content is unique. Sure, it should be paid for in some way. But to expect to be paid – over and over for the same content in perpetuity is beyond arrogance. Copyright laws have been perverted and repeatedly lengthened beyond what is reasonable and fair at the behest of corporations like Disney.
http://creativecommons.org/
Again, a fair and reasonable return is commendable. Just how stinking filthy rich do these bastards expect to become?
jccalhoun said, on May 8th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Yes, because the power brokers will really be able to prevent someone from reposting things on their blogs or from accessing international news sources that are government funded like the bbc. or just watching the television. yawn. non-story.
Try keeping up on current events, you stupid fool…
AP is currently in the process of going after people that repost their articles without pay.
And then you have this news blurb…
“- A landmark legal ruling in Sydney goes further than ever before in setting the trap door for the destruction of the Internet as we know it and the end of alternative news websites and blogs by creating the precedent that simply linking to other websites is breach of copyright and piracy.”
Nadrew said, on May 8th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Ok. Charge for content. But, what is a fair price? I believe in today’s multiple mass markets, content providers have the opportunity to reach vast numbers of customers and thus the incremental cost of products approach zero.
Very true. When there was 3 TV networks, their profit margin was potentially much higher.
Once the media companies decided to offer up hundreds of competing cable networks, they completely shot themselves in the foot. They now have smaller audiences, per program, and yet face similar cost to produce these programs. A insanley idiotic business move… to say the least.
Now they are facing an even bigger problem with the Internet, which slices the pie up into even smaller pieces.
It’s easy to see why they will soon make their move, with Internet2, to make that club far more exclusive.
The heading of this post should really be…
Internet DEATH WATCH
Blogs like this won’t be allowed to exist in a few years.
You’ll see…
http://tinyurl.com/qx4z88
Yes, the internet has changed the world. But the government wants to shut it down. They want to take back control of what was once originally their own. They know they can’t directly shut down the internet, do to an outrage on the part of the people.
So what they’ve done is create a corporate controlled Internet 2. Right now it is in its early stages and is only available on college campuses. But soon an attempt will be made to bring internet 2 into your home, and to slowly take away your rights and your ability to express yourself.
All the evidence shows the internet 2 will be used to crush the small but growing segment of home based businesses which have made a living based on the internet by heavily taxing domains and requiring licensing. Then only the big corporations will be able to flourish, as they do offline.
While profit margins may have been higher in the past, in todays environment, total profits can be higher due the the increased span. And, I submit, this can be achieved while charging a fair price for product.
Yeah, laugh it up Dvorak and cronies.
YOU guys are the ones on the endangered species list, not guys like Murdoch…
Excerpt from: http://tinyurl.com/d8cfn5
Do We Need a New Internet?
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: February 14, 2009
Two decades ago a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student brought the Internet to its knees with a simple software program that skipped from computer to computer at blinding speed, thoroughly clogging the then-tiny network in the space of a few hours.
The program was intended to be a digital “Kilroy Was Here.” Just a bit of cybernetic fungus that would unobtrusively wander the net. However, a programming error turned it into a harbinger heralding the arrival of a darker cyberspace, more of a mirror for all of the chaos and conflict of the physical world than a utopian refuge from it.
Since then things have gotten much, much worse.
Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.
What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.
“Unless we’re willing to rethink today’s Internet,” says Nick McKeown, a Stanford engineer involved in building a new Internet, “we’re just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.”
Nadrew said, on May 8th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
While profit margins may have been higher in the past, in todays environment, total profits can be higher due the the increased span. And, I submit, this can be achieved while charging a fair price for product.
There’s a finite number of viewers for their product. The profit margin is probably lower than you think.
I’ve worked on numerous TV shows and I know for a fact that they generally don’t make a profit until they go into syndication and/or DVD. I don’t believe that used to be the case before the widespread proliferation of cable TV.
The RIAA tried to destroy independent Internet Radio recently, using similar tactics…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundExchange
Why does Murdoch think any of his news companies are of use to anyone other than mouth breathing conservatives? You decide…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundExchange
Different royalty rates for Internet and satellite radio
On August 16, 2008, popular Internet broadcaster Pandora announced that it may have to cease operations, citing SoundExchange’s much higher royalty fee on Internet compared to satellite broadcast.[15] By 2010, Internet radio stations like Pandora will be expected to pay an estimated 2.91 cents per hour per listener, while satellite radio would pay a much lower 1.6 cents, and terrestrial radio would pay nothing. With Pandora’s current profit model, the fees which SoundExchange levy would amount to 70 percent of its revenue, making the service unprofitable. In comparison, satellite radio pays about nine percent of its revenue, as defined by their contract with SoundExchange, and terrestrial radio does not pay any of those fees, although it does pay royalties to other organizations.[16]
However, the Copyright Royalty Board assigned different rates and terms for satellite radio and Internet radio. They both have extremely different business models, and the methodology for creating rates and terms are based on completely different approaches. The rate for Internet radio under the CRB ruling is not derived by assessing the revenue or expenses; it is derived on a “per performance” basis. The rate for satellite radio, on the other hand, is derived by a percentage of revenue. The discussions as to why these differences occurred can be found in the decisions themselves.[17] [18]
Troublemaker – That used to be my nickname!
Anyway, the profit margin can be infinitely small if the viewers reach a high enough volume. Do producers make money on all the slices of cable channels? What is a profit? Keeping a crew employed for X number of years and providing residuals for many years after? Is there any creative accounting going on? Or is that something that went out of style? What about charging different prices in different locations? Say, $30 for a DVD in Japan. What will the market bear in Malaysia? This offers opportunities for arbitrage. Of course there is rampant piracy. In Vietnam/China/etc. you can buy almost any content for a dollar a disk. Maybe the market of viewers is larger than you think. Just the price being charged is ridiculous.
Of course, I am just speculating. I have never worked in the industry and have no real experience or knowledge.
btw I still think that AP should output all of its own content on its own website. Move away from the licensing of its content. This would create a situation where the content is now unique and available onle from a single source. How valuable would that be? Also, newspapers would have to report again. Of course they could only report/compete in areas where they had the resources to do the job. It would remove redundancies. People will pay for it.
Just do the math…
An average TV show costs around 3 million per hour. If you only have 3 networks, those networks spend 3 million per hour for programming.
If those networks each have 10, or so, subsidiary networks, they still need to spend 3 million per network for “original” programming. That comes out to 30 million per hour, for basically the SAME SIZE AUDIENCE.
My example is of course overly simplified, just to illustrate a point. Some networks run reruns and cheaper shows, in order to make up the difference, so they really don’t spend 30 mil per hour. However, there is still a substantial cost involved. Either way, they have cut their profit margin down dramatically.
Now magnify this equation against the whole spectrum of the Internet, and you can begin to see the dilemma from THEIR point of view.
They see each and every site on the Internet, such as this one, as direct competition, cutting into their profit margin. A single site like this one, may not pose much of a threat by itself, but multiply that by several hundred thousand and you get the picture.
Eventually they will do something about it. Their current solution is to create a corporate controlled Internet 2, where smaller operations will be killed with high taxes and license fees.
So sites like this are the ones on the endangered list, not guys like Murdoch.
THAT is what Murdoch means when he says…
“The current days of the internet will soon be over.”
And he’s right, it will be.
Enjoy it while you can.
There has been free TV for 50 years via the airwaves. Having a television station was like a license to print gold.
They made a fortune using something called advertising.
News can done by you, I or anyone who can type and preferably has some journalism training — which isn’t hard and is largely embelishing a story enough to make it interesting to read and organizing the sentences and paragraphs to prioritize facts. And citing sources of course.
Companies can have dreams about a more corporate internet that they design where they can make more money, but there are 2 problems with that:
1. The internet has never been about corporations. Corporations were late comers, universities and nerds were the first.
2. The internet has never been about money. In fact, it is the one place where money doesn’t matter.
Hmeyers said, on May 8th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Companies can have dreams about a more corporate internet that they design where they can make more money, but there are 2 problems with that:
1. The internet has never been about corporations. Corporations were late comers, universities and nerds were the first.
2. The internet has never been about money. In fact, it is the one place where money doesn’t matter.
You’re dead wrong. They monopolize TV and radio and they WILL monopolize the Internet soon…
http://tinyurl.com/qp9ljs
The jig is up for the corporate media. If they continue to allow free access to their content they will go out of business because there’s not enough advertising revenue coming in, whereas if they charge for content they will lose a huge chunk of their audience and their influence in shaping the news agenda will wane completely.
This is the price the corporate media has paid for lying, spinning and obfuscating on behalf of the virulently corrupt power elite and expecting the population to eat it up without question.
The corporate media monopoly has terminal cancer and they are losing their power, which is why they are aggressively supporting moves to phase out the old Internet altogether and replace it with “Internet 2,” a highly regulated and controlled electronic Berlin wall, where alternative voices will be silenced and giant corporate propaganda organs will dominate once again.
This is what Murdoch is really getting at when he assures us that, “The Internet will soon be over” and it’s down to us to stop that agenda from being realized.
http://internet2.edu/
“A consortium led by universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow’s Internet.”
Hmeyers said, on May 8th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
2. The internet has never been about money. In fact, it is the one place where money doesn’t matter.
Are you serious? What sort of insane nonsense is this?
# 34 jccalhoun asks:
“Why do they have sports sections when I have half a dozen sports channels on my television?”
Box scores, statistics, team rosters, full-season schedules — things that won’t fit or are inconvenient to read on a monitor screen.
– – – – –
As to the question: If my local paper went paperless, I might pay a small amount, no more than the cost of our current daily subscription, to get the local and state news and maybe the comics and crossword. But only if their coverage improved — a year to 18 months ago, for example, the weekly TV section was 28 pages. Now it’s 8. The entire paper is similarly downsized. The local news is maybe two or three pages, no bigger than the obituary section. As for national news, forget it. Foreign leaders come see President Obama? President Obama travels to visit foreign leaders? You wouldn’t know it from our paper! If it weren’t for the new flu, the only foreign countries mentioned in our paper during the last month would have been Iraq and Afghanistan, and if it weren’t for the nearby military bases, they probably wouldn’t use up the valuable column inches for those two…
So, yes, I probably would pay for local content not available free elsewhere, especially if it meant they could hire back some actual reporters. Luc ranted about the effort and cost it takes to go get the story and write (he said “make”) the news, but the current crop seem to do nothing but sit in a cubicle and make phone calls all day. How many times have I read “So-and-so did not return phone calls”? Lazy.
Of course, in these paranoid times, actually going out and knocking on doors and talking to strangers may be hazardous to one’s health. For their own safety, reporters should dress like the stereotype from the ’30s and ’40s movies, with the cheap, rumpled suit and the hat with the big “PRESS” tag stuck in the band!
Ha goodbye newspapers, don’t bother coming back
I really, really hope he goes on with this.
It will mean the beginning of the end for his media empire.
Over here in the UK this man wields enourmous power, all whilst hardly paying any tax at all. And polititians are too afraid of him to do anything.
Example:
About 6 months ago in the UK there was a huge vote in Parliament on a new law to allow police to detain suspects without charging them for up to 42 days. This was very, very contraversial, and it was thought that Prime Minister Brown could lose the vote. But with the usual political/career bribes & threats they got it through. There was a lot of bitterness in his own party about the tactics they used to get everyone to vote for it.
And it was huge in the media with massive coverage all day.
So what was our noble Prime Minister doing after this historic vote ? Well, he was at a lavish birthday party for the editor of the Sun newspaper(I use that term loosely, as it’s quite possible the trashiest most low brow paper in the world). Who owns the sun ? And who was at that party ?
Rupert Murdoch.
Hell, the Labour party even dragged Blair out of retirement just to suck up to Murdoch some more.
This man is dangerous. He is scum
troublemaker,
I don’t understand your math. If the average cost of production for prime time television is $3 million/hour, then no matter how many outlets the cost remains the same. Also, the viewership pie is still the still the same – no matter the slices. And not all content costs as much. Reality TV, Jay Leno, reruns. While there are an awful lot of channels, I really only watch 4 or 5.
If you are talking about the increased entertainment options – sure, now I can understand reduced viewership per production. There are only so many eyeballs and 24 hours in a day. Of course, worldwide, there are a lot of eyeballs. And as you said, there are cable, syndication and DVD revenue streams. And while most productions might not make a “profit”, they do support the “hits” which are wildly profitable. Seinfeld was making a million an episode. Of course, he is exceptional, but he couldn’t command that if the execs didn’t think there was still profit in there somewhere.
Anyway, probably most actors/writers and crew aren’t getting rich. But enough of them are making a comfortable living. And it seems to me, that enough are living a pretty good life indeed. Probably a bell distribution curve? Brings me back to what is a fair price and profit?
Back to topic. As long as content is available from multiple sources, then charging for said content is not viable. If the AP does tighten up distribution, then charging could work for original content newspaper sites. btw I rarely go to sites that even require registration – let alone subscription fee. Maybe Murdoch is applying a little misdirection.
btw I remember when “Tar Baby” Murdoch’s (at least that’s what Jimmy Breslin used to call him) New York Post was involved in a heated cross town rivalry with the Daily News in the 70’s. The Post, while entertaining, was tabloid journalism at best – although their sports section was quite good. My opinion of Murdoch, shaped during that time hasn’t changed much. An opportunist. He became American so that he could own a TV station. His journalism was not of high quality in Australia, England or America. He seemed not the most scrupulous businessman. Somewhat of a sharp angler – willing to do anything to make a buck. And while I now enjoy the Fox Network’s original programming very much, their news sucks.
@Troublemaker
“‘2. The internet has never been about money. In fact, it is the one place where money doesn’t matter.’
Are you serious? What sort of insane nonsense is this?”
Free knowledge (wikipedia, google books, etc.)
Free software (download.com, sourceforge, etc.)
Free news
Equal access
And the availability of low cost resources (ebay, amazon.com, netflix)
Free education for the motivated
The internet is what you get out of it.
This site is run on WordPress, WordPress is free.
Corporate capitalism as we know it has been changing for years and the balance between corporate interests, private citizens and government interests is always a struggle.
In the world you claim we live in, the internet would have been pay for use like AOL or Compuserve with corporate ownership.
But that isn’t the world we have, the open internet won.
I wouldn’t ever give that fascist a penny. It’s not wrong to charge for this though this won’t work in the long run, it’s just wrong to support the fascism he represents.