Posted on 09/09/2010 11:02:33 AM PDT by lbryce
We had already seen the early indications that Rupert Murdoch's paywalls from The Times and The Sunday Times in the UK were a dismal failure, but as more information gets leaked about how the paywalls are working out, it's looking worse and worse. Beyond the fact that not too many people are signing up to pay, the move has upset advertisers who don't want to advertise to such a small audience:
Faced with a collapse in traffic to thetimes.co.uk, some advertisers have simply abandoned the site. Rob Lynam, head of press trading at the media agency MEC, whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, "We are just not advertising on it. If there's no traffic on there, there's no point in advertising on there." Lynam says he has been told by News International insiders that traffic to The Times site has fallen by 90 per cent since the introduction of charges.
On top of that, various PR people and publicists are keeping their sources away from Times reporters, preferring to provide access to news organizations where the story might actually get seen by people, rather than locked up behind Murdoch's paywall:
Publicists have told me that clients are increasingly reluctant to give interviews or stories to The Times, on the grounds that they would not be made freely available via search engines.
(Excerpt) Read more at techdirt.com ...
Well, there's an abundance of gonzo-journalism, to be sure. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not. Time will tell. There is certainly an abundance of after-the-fact editors and fact-checkers, and that is clearly a GREAT thing, as seen in RatherGate.
But, there's a wide divide between gonzo-journalism, and the kind of journalism that gave us the "All the President's Men". Despite how you might feel about Woodward & Bernstein, they ended the craziness and the criminality of an out of control President. I'm not sure if 30 years from now, that same mechanism will exist, and that should frighten everyone.
The old guard media discredited itself once and for all in my mind when they became obama bootlickers, and actively campaigned for his election.
They have only themselves to blame for their irrelevance now.
“Screw the paywall, I refuse to pay $400 for the Wall Street Journal delivered! “
If you’ll hunt about online, there should be plenty of deals in the $99.00 range for the first year of the WSJ, including the online version.
After the first year, let the subscription lapse, and then go for another first year. That’s what I do.
But you’re right, no way is the WSJ worth $400.00 to the average person.
“You can get around the WSJ paywall by using Google. Murdoch has complained mightily about this.”
I don’t understand why Murdoch complains about Google-driven traffic; the online WSJ does that on purpose. WSJ opens their paywall to search-engine linking on purpose because if they didn’t, the site would be 100% paywalled, traffic would drop to almost nothing and no one would advertise on it.
What Murdoch really hates is that he didn’t invent Google, but instead arrived to the Internet land grab over a decade too late, just like very one else except for ebay, craigslist, and Google, which beat everyone else to the punch in 1998-1999 and staked out all the good new Internet monopolies before the existing monopolistic plutocrats finally got a clue to what was going on, which was by then over 10 years too late.
And quite frankly, that was a good thing since it broke the local market monopolies of almost every establishment (leftest) media outlet in one fell swoop. The media were actually all killed in 1998-1999, but didn’t know it until 12 years later since it took that long for the information to traverse their primitive nervous systems to reach their pea-sized dinosaur brains.
Unfortunately, when Murdock bought it he thought the paywall for online and $400 for the delivered version was a good idea. I don’t want to read it online, I like the dead tree copy, but $400 is insulting. (I’ll probably give in)
Like, d'oh, dude! It's a lose-lose strategy - lose eyeballs, traffic and advertisement revenue. Everybody is talking about WSJ / FT "Web model" but part of the content is still free, and for the tiny percentage of population that subscribes to these publications the service represents a small fraction of income / wealth, and the timely and/or semi-"exclusive" financial news and analysis may easily recoup the price of annual subscription.
WSJ and FT can double-dip with revenues from subscriptions AND advertisements due to leverage of unique and relatively inexpensive content. In addition, WSJ has other media properties (Barron's, Smart Money, MarketWatch, FoxBusiness etc.) where it can leverage content or use as subscription bundles.
The same simply is not true of general "copycat" news / opinion / editorial print publications transplanted to the Web. In other words, the WSJ / FT Web model is not portable or scalable for virtually all other general-purpose print publications. NYT tried this once and had to abandon it because of dismal result - losing viewers also leads to losing "eyeballs" and severe hit to advertising revenue stream measured per M*eyeballs. NYT bosses are about to try it again next year, and they will fail again.
Instead of trying to get the subscription model going on the Web, they should concentrate on increasing traffic to and "stickiness" at their Web sites and target advertising better. They simply don't think of subscriptions as a "tax" on their content "consumers" so it's not surprising that they think they can keep all the viewers AND the advertising revenue in the subscription model. The print delivery model is going the same way - subscriptions are dropping while "free" weeklies are doing reasonably well with the advertising alone, despite the increasing cost of printing and distribution.
Murdoch tried to get ahead of the crowd in the social media market by buying Myspace, but had no idea what to do with it and by looking and expecting to monetize it early, he let Facebook pretty much run away with the potential market. Just like Google conquered the market by not expecting to monetize it too soon, before it captured the overwhelming majority of eyeballs in its space.
Murdoch cut his teeth in print (and later in TV) media, the manufacturing and distribution of which is expensive and constrained, so the double-dipping of subscriptions and advertising was natural and unchallenged. So he is trying to put this genie back into the bottle and turn back the ease, speed and cheapness of distribution and generation of content in the new world of e-media.
Funny that Rupert’s call for “everybody” to adopt paywalls smacks of collusion, especially with the “club” in which almost “everybody” didn’t want him to be a member. And he is about the only one who has the unique property (WSJ family) that can actually support the mixed revenue model. Maybe what he really wants to do is to entice them into trying it and speed up their demise in the process.
That’s very sneaky, Mr. Murdoch! No wonder most of your competitors
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