Rupert Murdoch announced a few days ago News Corp will begin transitioning their sites to a subscription based model. Most folks probably know Rupert as the online visionary who bought MySpace and took it to new heights. Now, using the Wall Street Journal as an example he’s hoping to be the de facto industry leader in revolutionizing the way we access our news content.
Couple problems with that. First, traffic to your network of Fox News websites will plummet. My guess is you lose around 95% of your unique visitors. The only ones left paying will be the O’Reilly and Beck fan club members. So if you do keep 5% of the 10.8 million unique visitors, will you charge them $8 per month like WSJ? Would that be more than you currently make from display ads? Will your writers care that they lost a bulk of their readers? How much will you spend on legal fees fighting copyright? Have you read the book “Free”?
My guess is some folks would pay a small amount for quality, niche journalism. Hey, we pay for HBO and Pay Per View for similar reasons, why not news? For starters, unlike niche television programming, we’re being conditioned to let the news come to us. We can get it on our pc’s, macs, mobile devices, all through a centralized touch point like an iGoogle page. News comes to us via RSS feeds, Social Media Networks i.e. Facebook Fan Pages, Tweets, Google Alerts, and various client apps. So why would we seek out paid channels? If Fox blocks their free RSS feeds then that’s just one less source piping into my Google Reader. I will still have dozens of other streams, including those from citizen journalists and bloggers – folks who write and create content not for profit but mostly for status and recognition. Which begs the question, since most if not all major news outlets are now on Twitter and send out headline news with link backs to their sites, will they simply stop tweeting or hit you with a pay wall upon click thru? In any case this seems like a short sighted attempt to fix a long tail problem. Maybe Rupert should look at Howard Stern as a case study. He drew a fraction of his 12 million original listeners to Sirius, a subscription based service, and has recently been rumored to be going back to terrestrial radio. As Stern found out, it’s the listeners that count and no matter how good he was when he left Infinity at the top of his game, he could never compete with free radio. What News Corp needs to understand is that news is a commodity, essentially a product which is the same no matter who produces it. So why buy the cow when there’s a free cow standing right next to it?
Switching gears to music, it’s the weekend so putting up a track I have in rotation right now. A little MJ.
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