They've had enough. Enough of all you freeloaders stopping by their sites and not paying. Enough of you ignoring the ads they've served up for you. And enough of you reading and sharing their stuff elsewhere.
'They' is traditional newspaper and media publishers who are now online. And their point of view can best be summed up by (New Zealand) National Business Review boss Barry Colman who told subscribers he was drawing a line under "the crazy model adopted by newspapers in most parts of the free world in which they pay the enormous costs of running professional newsrooms only to give away their content away free."
As a result, the age of free, the ability to read almost anything, anywhere online and not have to cough up for it, is something they now want to bring to a close. And there's a concerted effort going on from some of the biggest guns in the industry, to try and make this happen. Consider that:
1 - The Newspaper Licensing Authority, which represents Britain's national newspaper groups, wants to dole out licenses before you can share links.
The idea is that if you professionally monitor the websites of newspapers (which most agencies and in house marketing departments do), you will need an annual license from the NLA for the simple act of forwarding a URL of a newspaper website by email....which obviously brings traffic back to said site.
While focusing on the relatively soft target of people like myself who need to monitor the media as part of their jobs, the NLA doesn't actually have the cojones to go after Google News, under the rationale that Google doesn't make money from it (news to Google I'm sure). But the Associated Press in the US does.
2 - Last year the Associated Press got in hot water when it announced it was charging bloggers for using as little as five words of its content in posts. The AP kind of backed down, but now this proposal rears its head again in a different form. However it's not small time bloggers that are in the AP's sights but global search engines like Google, (Microsoft) Bing and Yahoo!.
According to the New York Times, AP President Tom Curley said "if someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred million businesses out of headlines and we're going to do that." And that I think is the crux of it. It's not so much copyright as a case of, "we want some of what they're getting!"
Though the AP gets money for its content to appear on Google News and the Huffington Post, it doesn't get anything from general search results. This is what it wants to change via - just like Britain's NLA - a system where it doles out licenses before you can link back.
A system that sounds to me much like 18th century trade protectionism. Buy a license to import or export goods - or in this case, buy a license before you can send links around.
"The current days of the Internet will soon be over"
3 - And then we have the giant of the English speaking media world Rupert Murdoch planning to charge for his portfolio of newspapers in the US, the UK and Australia with a News International team in Sydney looking into ways that this might work. Murdoch has put so much behind this that Wired in its latest issue wondered: "Can Rupert Murdoch save online news?"
According to Murdoch, "We will control the prices for our content and we will control the relationship with our customers...the current days of the internet will soon be over.” So that's that then.
Well maybe not. I wonder whether ultimately the attempts of the old guard are ultimately doomed for three reasons:
1 - For this to work everyone really has to be aligned. So ALL major newspaper groups need to be in step and start charging. Otherwise, news is news and consumers will carry on going to where its free.
The Daily Telegraph in the UK for one has already decided that free is ultimately more lucrative as it allows it to sell loads of other stuff onto its user base. And what the New York Times has in mind doesn't really sound like charging for content either.
The biggest gap in the charging wall however will come from online TV news services like BBC and CNN online. With their websites being much like online newspapers with added video anyway, they stand to benefit from consumers who simply just want 'the news' (as opposed to the news from The Times etc).
2 - As the Wired piece admits, it's all very well to charge for the Wall Street Journal, but looking at other titles in Murdoch's stable how about the tabloid The Sun (or the New York Post in the US)? Will a subscription model really work there?
3 - The Web is the hotbed of invention. Perhaps charging will provide an opportunity for other services to emerge, Huffington Post style, to carry on providing free content. And really there often is a work around to a lot of these ideas. For example, I mentioned the newspaper licensing agency here in the UK. The NLA intends to charge for sending links by email but not via Twitter....well fine, guess we'll Twitter direct message the links, which get forwarded to, um, email.
Ultimately what publishers are trying to do is to turn back the tide of history and how often does that work? I don't think it can, especially since free is now the norm, encouraged by none other than the likes of Rupert Murdoch in the first place. Interesting times in watching publishers trying to make this stick over the coming year though.
Image - Myrrh.ahn
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This is interesting - Will Sullivan at Poynter Online has a report on online audiences getting used to longer web videos.
It's a theme that I've posted on before on my home blog, that despite the huge numbers touted around about the online video explosion, those same numbers have pointed to something completely different once you scratch beneath the surface.
Namely that while it's reach mass adoption levels, online video viewing is done in short several minute bursts - indeed Tube Mogul found out last year that most people stop watching after the first sixty seconds. Then there's the statistic that most web-only TV style mini series don't fare well at all, losing most viewers after episode one. The overall conclusion until now has been that online video is fine for a bit of light entertainment here and there, but for TV style viewing, the TV itself still rules supreme.
Will Sullivan points to a New York Times piece by Brian Selter who talks about the cat on keyboard style stuff being "supplemented by a new, more vibrant generation of online video." Quality is up, so is the technology and so is the content. The long term trend is that online video is growing up as a medium.
Is this a threat to TV companies in the same way that online media is to print? Absolutely not. For starters, average video durations were still only 3.4 minutes in March according to Comscore. More to the point, the TV industry has been at the forefront of seeing the Web as an extension of its media property and not a threat, with whole programmes being available for free online via devices such as the BBC's iPlayer.
Interestingly the New York Times points out there is another parallel to films at first being extremely short. Due to the technology not being up to scratch, the first kinetoscopes in the 1890s were only about 30 seconds long: "It probably felt like a giant dangerous leap to short films of three minutes."
Image - GR Shado
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Recently Comscore was commissioned to do a report on behalf of online publishers to show that online display really does work. "Forget about the click through" was the angle, "what matters is that these ads drive awareness."
A piece of research out by Harris Interactive casts some doubt on that. A survey of American consumers found that when it came to ad formats found to be the most 'helpful' in influencing purchasing decisions, TV came top on 37%.
TV was followed by newspaper advertising on 17% while search engine advertising scored a respectable 14%. However at the bottom of the table, only 3% considered radio ads the most helpful, dropping down to 1% for Internet banner ads.
When it came to ad formats they claimed to 'ignore', only 6% of consumers ignored newspaper advertising (there is life in the old dog yet), 9% ignored radio ads, 13% TV and 17% search engine advertising. Internet ads? 46% claimed to have banner blindness.
For a more detailed response that I posted around the Comscore study, see a post I wrote on my home blog.
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Last week Charles Arthur wrote an, as you'd expect much discussed, Guardian piece on the long tail of blogging 'dying.' His rationale was that in the long term, people are turning to more immediate and concise services such as Twitter and Facebook updates to share their thoughts.
This is a theme that comes around time and time again. For example, last October, Paul Boutin wrote an article on Wired entitled "Twitter, Flickr, Facebook make blogs look so 2004."
The numbers don't show a decline
Charles Arthur quotes the Technorati stat from last year that shows that 95% of the 133 million blogs are basically dead - abandoned due to lack of interest or time. But that's still seven million+ that are alive and well.
And on his data mining blog, MSN's Matthew Hurst produced a series of graphs to prove that blogs aren't declining. He took a series of common (not news led) terms like car repair and birthday, things that you'd imagine to be fairly consistent year round.
Looking at Blogpulse (which Matthew co-created), he found 142 posts about car repair on 4 Jan and 144 on 21 June. Similarly, he took the term 'birthday' and found the trend to be fairly straight.
Does Twitter actually give blogs a new lease of life?
I'd also take the opposite view to Charles Arthur: Rather than spelling the kiss of death, Twitter and Facebook give a lot of blogs a new lease of life.
That's because in a lot of cases, Twitter is not a self contained place to have conversations (the stereotype being it's where people blast off 140 character thoughts about what they had for breakfast), it's somewhere where conversations kick off that get taken elsewhere.
So I predict that in a year's time we'll still be having 'decline of blogs' type pieces...and plenty of posts like this in return.
Blogging is dead - long live blogging
As an aside, A List blogger Steve Rubel recently announced that he's done with blogging...actually not really as he admits himself.
What he's done is move his blog over onto Posterous. While he calls Posterous a lifestream, we're really talking semantics as Posterous is a blogging platform that's a few steps on from blogger in terms of functionality, in that it integrates better with Twitter, Facebook and video sharing sites.
It's something I'd been considering (and no doubt a lot of other bloggers) myself - moving this site onto a system that gives me a few more options - and no doubt with Steve's lead others will now follow. The point is, it shows that the blogging industry isn't permanently stuck back in 2004, but continues to evolve.
Image - Matthew Hurst / Blog Pulse
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Dirk Singer
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