Search results matching tag 'Rupert Murdoch'

Murdoch serious about split from Google as talks held with Microsoft

255762 — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:09:00 GMT

Looks like Rupert Murdoch wasn't simple sabre ratting (as fun as that is) about splitting from Google. It is being reported this morning that News Corporation is in talks with Microsoft about a possible split with the search giant.

According to a report in the Financial Times the plan would involve News Corp being paid to "de-index" its news websites from Google.

Getting in bed with Microsoft makes perfect sense. Microsoft hates Google (and its plans for applications and an operating system) as much as it hates Apple and it would set up a real search engine battle between Google and Bing. Until now it doesn’t feel like we have much of a fight although ComScore says Bing is gaining ground. In October it accounted for 9.9% per cent of searches in the US in October up from 8.4% per cent at its launch.

Still it feels more like a one party state – if more fun than your average Stalinist party get together.

The paper says that although talks are at an early stage Microsoft has approached other big online publishers, but mentions no names.

Newspaper publishers would like nothing more to stop Google acting like a parasite on their businesses. As well as News Corp, which owns The Times, The Sun and The Wall Street Journal, other publishers including Guardian News & Media have also raised concerns over Google.

The FT says that one publisher said Microsoft's plan "puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them" and added that the move was "all about Microsoft hurting Google's margins".

The talks with Microsoft come as News Corp delays plans until early next year to erect a pay wall around its content.

Although we do know as of last week from James Harding, the editor of The Times, that the paper would launch a subscription service for online access early next year making it likely that the paper would be the first News Corp title to implement a system of paid content.

Rupert Murdoch, of course, recently hit out at Google in an interview he gave to Sky News Australia where he questioned the value it brings to newspapers.

"No[ it's not a two way street with Google sending traffic] What's the point of someone coming occasionally who likes a headline they see on Google? Sure we go out and say we have so many millions of visitors. The fact is that there is not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the websites profitable. We'd rather have fewer people coming to our websites but paying. They don't suddenly become loyal readers of our websites."

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Murdoch: online news to be smaller and less important

255762 — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:52:00 GMT

In case you were in some doubt regarding the future for online news James Murdoch is telling it straight. He says that online news will in the future have a smaller audience, be less important (than broadcast) and come with a premium price tag.

James Murdoch, who is chief executive of News Corporation Europe, gives the impression that online and printed news is going to be sidelined almost by a future which the company -- he is set to lead -- is ushering in. And that is the wider reality: news outlets are being sidelined and shuttered as there is no longer any revenue to support them -- the world it seems is shrinking. We saw that this week with the closure of Media Week.

According to James Murdoch there is a role for online and print journalism, but it is not as big as that of entertainment: "In the business of ideas, which is the business that we are in, we do think journalism plays a role, and we do think there are business models there that will make a lot of sense, albeit perhaps not at the scale of some of our broadcasting businesses and other entertainment businesses.

"Is it going to be as big a role? No," he said. "Structurally, television is vastly more profitable and a big opportunity,"

Murdoch, who was speaking who was speaking at the Morgan Stanley annual Technology, Media and Telecoms Conference in Barcelona, also spoke about developing what he called a wholesale market for its digital news, which is part of its plans to erect a pay wall around its content with The Times and The Sunday Times in the UK being the first to implement this. Earlier this week Times editor James Harding said that his paper would launch a subscription service for online access early next year.

"Our digital activities -- we are going to push them harder but we are actually going to be charging a premium price for them. We will have a smaller audience than giving it away for free, but I think it is the crucial step in starting to develop a wholesale market for digital journalism," James Murdoch said.

Murdoch told Reuters that his top priorities were building on News Corp's positions in pay TV in Europe and India (where it has Star TV) as well as "rebuilding the profitability of newspapers".

"We invest quite a lot in our journalism, we're very proud of it, we think it has great quality and great value, and we think that we should be charging a fair price for it, both to customers but also to other firms who might want to take it to customers in whatever way.

"We think that there's a very exciting market place, potentially a wholesale market place for digital journalism that we'll be developing," he added.

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Times editor (UK) gives details on paid content plans

255762 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:36:00 GMT

James Harding, the editor of The Times, has revealed a few details about the paper's plan to charge for content as part of Rupert Murdoch's pay wall ambitions.

According to MediaGuardian and Press Gazette, Harding told the Society of Editors conference in Stanstead, Essex, that the paper would launch a subscription service for online access early next year. The announcement follows news earlier this month that News Corp would not hit its target to launch a pay wall by the end of this year.

He said that The Times and The Sunday Times were likely to lead Murdoch's paid content initiative and be the first to charge for digital content in Murdoch's News Corporation media empire.

Harding said less frequent visitors to Times.co.uk would be able to purchase 24 hours access, which would likely cost the same as buying a print edition of the Times. The paper is currently 90p, but £1 seems like a nice round figure to me.

What we know for sure is that it won't be micropayments. Harding dismissed the idea of micro-payments for individual articles, which is being looked at by some other news organisations.

He likened the free access model to "window shopping down Oxford Street", but said these people were not coming into "our shops".

"From spring of next year we will start charging for the digital edition of the Times. We're working on the exact pricing model, but we'd charge for a day's paper, for a 24-hour sign-up to the Times. We'll also establish a subscription price as well," Harding said.

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Jeremy Clarkson a possible top earner as people vote for micropayments over subs (Emap?)

255762 — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:33:00 GMT

People have said they would be willing to pay small amounts for online content (we're talking 2p to 20p), which is very encouraging. And good news for Rupert Murdoch as Jeremy Clarkson tops the list of online columnists.

Having read this research Murdoch is no doubt on the blower to Google's Eric Schimdt (now that he has had his chat with Gordon Brown) spreading the word that people would be willing to pay for his top columnist Jeremy Clarkson.

Interestingly, while other research has suggested subscriptions are the favoured option Continental Research found that micropayments came out on top (although clearly 500 polled is not a massive sample) with 21% saying they would pay this kind of charge as opposed to only 5% saying they would be prepared to pay a monthly or yearly subscription. This could possibly be bad news for Emap with its £150 subscription charge, but i have a feeling that the difference here is that between the B2B market and the consumer. B2B is a traditional subs market with people used to paying that way (not to say that it wouldn't benefit with different payment options).

The good news doesn’t stop with Clarkson for Murdoch. Other News Corporation columnists feature heavily in the top ten, according to Continental: Giles Coren, gossip writer Gordon Smart (pay for gossip – that's a stretch) and Jane Moore also feature. I see a stack of coins behind up at Murdoch towers.

One point though: you have to ask where Continental found these people, I mean seriously this is a bag of mostly right wingers with a few honourable exceptions.

1. Jeremy Clarkson
2. Charlie Brooker*
3. Richard Littlejohn
4. Giles Coren*
5. Simon Heffer
6. Gordon Smart
7. Lorraine Kelly
8. Peter Hitchins
9. Jane Moore
10. Melanie Phillips.

What the list does help articulate though is an idea of what some form of paid content might look like. The pulling power of these big hitters could be the driving force behind a paid content package….if the amount was small enough.

Of the above I could imagine paying for only of the above, but I could easily imagine paying small sums for similar types of content in a iTunes kind of way. That kind of "content shopping" can be quite addictive (certainly in terms of music and video) and would I'm sure work for words as well.

What Continental found (and clearly this is not a surprise) is that if you raise the entry barrier higher than 2p the numbers swiftly fell away. While 35% said they definitely or probably pay 2p per article that dropped to 22% who were prepared to pay 5p; 13% and 7% prepared at 10p and 20p.

Clearly, 2p is too little (plus think of all the small plastic bank bags you would need for that stuff), but 20p is far more attractive and not unreasonable. At that point you still have 7% willing to pay and you do not need large numbers to pay to make paid content work.

What is encouraging here is that the figures chime with the research done by the blog paidContent:UK back in September. It found that 5% of people who read a news site at least once a month would pay.

Putting top columnists and other pieces of content behind a pay wall makes some sense. While Continental's research is about micropayments (possibly complex to implement) the model of restricting access to certain articles would work as easily for either a club or some other subscription package.

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Is Murdoch really plannng a Google free future?

255762 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:40:00 GMT

Rupert Murdoch has taken time out to tell Sky News Australia why he might ban his content from Google and why he'd rather have fewer visitors coming to his (paid for) websites (not to mention a quick bash at the thieving BBC).

In an interview with Sky News Australia News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch has been explaining why (but not how) people will be paying to read The Times and his other newspapers in the future.

He also said that News Corp might remove its content from Google searches. The implications of that are quite serious and far reaching and I really can't see it happening. Even for paid content isn't Google a marketing opportunity that showcases content?

Anyway, Murdoch raised an interesting point about the role of Google and other aggregators. Asked if it wasn't a two way street when Google sends traffic to a News Corp websites Murdoch disagreed arguing that the value of someone coming from Google was not the same as a loyal reader.

"No[ it's not a two way street with Google sending traffic] What's the point of someone coming occasionally who likes a headline they see on Google? Sure we go out and say we have so many millions of visitors. The fact is that there is not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the websites profitable. We'd rather have fewer people coming to our websites but paying. They don't suddenly become loyal readers of our websites."

Two things: loyal readers might come via Google on occasion and secondly how do you become a loyal reader in the digital age?

Murdoch earlier in the interview said that it was difficult to get people under 30 to buy newspapers. If that's true and these readers surf pages on Google instead of thumb pages then how do you win them over and make them pay? Where do you get these loyal readers from? And as I said earlier doesn't search have a role to pay in that process?

I think it does. Granted many people clicking on a news headline might only be after that single story and that alone, but others might be after more. Or more of the same.

He went on in the interview to raise, but not answer one of the biggest hurdles that News Corp and others face in the introduction of paid content. If you can't get people under 30 to read newspapers (although clearly that is not entirely true) then how do you get them to pay online and become loyal readers?

He also again failed to mention any specific system of paid content that News Corp was looking at although he did dismiss the freemium model and said that like the Wall Street Journal (although do you think he'll get some to finally fix that WSJ.com glitch where you put a headline in quotes into Google and get to read the story for free?) everything was likely to go behind a pay wall.

He also took time to accuse the BBC and its Australian counter part ABC (which described Murdoch's paid content plan as the "classic play of an empire in decline) of stealing his content.

"We're better and any rate if you look at their stuff (the BBC and the ABC) most of their stuff is stolen from the newspapers now and we'll be suing them for copyright and they'll have to spend a lot more money on reporters covering the world."

As if The Times or the Sun never picked up on a BBC story.

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More pay walls – Emap makes its pitch/readers respond

255762 — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:42:00 GMT

There are some interesting comments cropping up on Retail Week's blog about its plan to charge readers £150 and put some online content behind a pay wall on November 13.

In the blog post Retail Week editor Tim Danaher makes his pitch to the magazine readers telling them about Emap's plans to boost its online offering with a raft of new services and explaining how this new content should only benefit subscribers.

For B2B publishers in particular this is the pitch. It is the same one that Centaur and its NMA title made this week as these titles look to protect their magazine subscriber base in a tough climate where the B2B sector has been as hard hit as any. There have been a slew of magazine closures and job losses and that pain is far from over. More magazine closures are almost guaranteed.

Haymarket Media, which owns Brand Republic, yesterday reported a 43% drop in pre-tax profits (in the year to December 31 2008).

Today United Business Media, publisher of Music Week, Travel Trade Gazette and the Publican, said it planned to reduce the number of print titles that it published as they become "complementary components of an integrated product portfolio".

"In anticipation of this market trend, we are managing our portfolio towards a smaller set of market-leading, commercially sustainable titles, each operating within an integrated product portfolio."

As for Emap and Retail week it must be nerve racking to announce all this in the same week that Rupert Murdoch revealed that his plans to introduce paid content are not on track. Questions will inevitably be raised by readers and rivals.

The comments in response to Tim Danaher's blog post are only a few in number, but I think they are indicative of the spread of opinion in the market. What is encouraging to note from Emap's perspective is that there is positive in with the negative as it asks people to pay up during a steep economic downturn.

The very first commenter seems to sum up well the issues that everyone considering such a move will no doubt be mulling. I'll bullet point:

1. I cant afford it.
2. Mr Murdoch thinking about charging is relevant, however I have an alternative to the Times website and that's the BBC which is much better.
3. He's going to read The Grocer (the rival to Retail Week) instead
4. He wishes retail week Good luck as we all do.

Clearly, Emap has already researched this and worked out that if enough of its readers will join it on its foray into paid content and pay £150. Although I wonder if it asked readers if they would switch to a rival if a charge were introduced.

Clearly, having a healthy well resourced rival that remains free could prove a major stumbling block to achieving a successful paid content strategy.

There are a few other points that Retail Week readers raised. A couple expressed interest in an "online only service if it was cheaper than the printed and digital versions combined".

This sentiment appears to echo what UBM is talking about and while the reader might what it their desire does not chime with what Emap and Centaur are trying to achieve with their desire to protect print copies and any offline ad market they have a slice of as well.

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#BRBallot - As Rupert Murdoch delays his plans for paid content will it happen?

255762 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:34:06 GMT

Rupert Murdoch has delayed his plans for paid content, talks about banning his sites from Google, and the New York Times admitted it was struggling with the issue, is there a future for newspapers and paid content? Tell us what you think and vote now in our poll.

[Poll]

Murdoch stalls on the road to paid content/NMA raise pay wall

255762 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:06:00 GMT

First it was the New York Times and now Rupert Murdoch has hinted that News Corporation may not hit its year end deadline to implement paid content.

Murdoch, who owns the Times and the Sun, Wall Street Journal and New York Post (what a great front page; great game), told reporters that he can not promise that News Corp will meet its own deadline.

"We are working all very, very hard at it but I wouldn't promise that we are going to meet that date. It's a work in progress and there is a huge amount of work going on, not just with our sites but with other people," Murdoch said in a conference with journalists.

According to the Age when he was asked about the delay Murdoch said he was "not prepared to comment on that at all". Thorny issue.

Murdoch & Co are struck by the exact same thing that has hit the New York Times execs earlier this week when executive editor, Bill Keller, admitted that the issue of charging had proved a much tougher and more complicated decision "than it seems to all the armchair experts".

This seems to indicate that executives at both News Corp and the New York Times Company are struggling to work out which system they are going to opt for in their pursuit of paid content.

The delay will validate critics who say that newspapers are going to find it very hard to successful erect pay walls and get cash from their readers who are so used to a world of free.

The news that News Corp is delaying its decision to implement a pay wall came as its first quarter results revealed a sharp fall in operating income in its newspaper business, down to $25m in the three months to September from $134m last time as advertising revenue fell in the UK 15% and at the Wall Street Journal.

All those numbers say that Murdoch is not going to turn away or balk at the paid content conundrum. He doesn't think he can with news papers losing money like that. My bet is for some kind of limited subscription model – like the Financial Times where a certain amount of articles are given away (30 a month in the case of the FT) – or a membership club, which is something being looked at with interest by a lot of media firms including the New York Times, The Times and Guardian News & Media.

What I really wouldn't expect is micropayments. Well not in the short term at least. I'm sure the first step will be a limited pay wall option that could later be extended to something more complex.

It has been a busy week in paid content all round with real stuff happening – in B2B at least. Earlier this week Emap plumped for a £150 charge and now rival Centaur has opted to put more of the content of its digital magazine NMA (already £99-a-year with a subscription) behind a pay wall.

In a statement on its website NMA says the move is part of the "title's phased strategy to introduce a range of premium content and services to add value to bundled subscriptions".

"Like all other publishers, we're experimenting with paid-for models online," said editor Justin Pearse. "While previously lead stories from the magazine were accessible for free, we’re confident this content, together with the analysis our site provides to the industry, is worth paying for."

Next up?

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Mass layoffs begin at Time Inc/Murdoch hires (plans newspaper war)

255762 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:23:00 GMT

We've already seen big cuts this year at Conde Nast now it is the turn of IPC Media parent Time Inc, which is set to announce as many as 500 job cuts today.

The New York Times reports that the layoffs begun yesterday at Time Inc when 15 to 20 sales and marketing staff were first to hear the bad news largely from Sports Illustrated.

The cuts are part of a plan to save $100m and the NY Times quotes an executive saying that the total number of layoffs as being between 400 and 500 people, which are expected to come from the news division, which includes Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated.

Details of these job cuts are due today at 10am (3pm UK). Other magazines likely to be hit include People and InStyle and Real Simple and Cooking Light. They come after this morning's announcement of a 38% drop in third-quarter profits and a 6% fall in revenues to $7.1bn at parent company Time Warner. Revenues at AOL fell 23% ahead of a planned spin-off that is still on the cards.

No word on how this might affect the UK business IPC Media and whether it will be asked to contribute to this cost saving target.

A note of light in this job loss darkness is that few job losses will come from the digital business, according to PaidContent.

While jobs are going at Time Inc, Rupert Murdoch is cooking up a fresh newspaper war. You just can't keep a good media mogul down. After battling in London and axing TheLondonPaper, Murdoch has decided that New York deserves his attention.

He is planning to hire around a dozen reporters in New York to cover local and state news for the Wall Street Journal in its battle to take on the New York Times and transform itself from a business centric title to one that has more general news.

This sucks if you are former Boston Bureau staffer for the WSJ. That bureau was closed. One the plus side if you are one of the 100 New York Times staffers due to be axed it might suck less presenting a fresh employment opportunity. One question that strikes me is that in its drive to be more like the New York Times, you know but to the right, will this hit its money making online subscription base. The WSJ has grown because it is errrm not a general newspaper. Could someone explain that one to me? Thanks

Elsewhere another barometer for the health of US newspapers has taken a dip. Former New York Times journalist and baseball writer, not to mention pioneer in sports blogging, Murray Chass has noticed a mass fall in US newspaper coverage of this year's World Series between the best team in baseball, the New York Yankees, who lead the Philadelphia Phillies 3-2.

On his blog he notes that 29 of the 60 newspapers that cover major league teams during the season on the road as well as at home are not at this year's World Series. That is a huge drop. Last year these papers were all there, but no more.

He quotes Bud Selig, the baseball commissioner, saying: "It’s a manifestation of what’s happening in America. I’m saddened by it. I think newspaper coverage over the years has enabled us to succeed much more than a lot of people understand so for me this is a very, very unhappy development."

These are big metropolitan newspapers including the likes of the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, the Seattle Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, who have made cuts and are no longer covering one of the biggest sporting weeks in the US suggesting more pain to come.

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Murdoch forces Sorrell to make U-turn over paid-content

1641923 — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:56:00 GMT

Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP and one of adland's best known soothsayers, has dramatically revised his stance on the viability of publishers charging for content online following comments from the quintessential newspaper man, Rupert Murdoch.

Speaking at an industry event in Greece last week, The Daily Telegraph reports an irrepressible Sorrell, as saying: "[Rupert] Murdoch is absolutely correct to try and get people paying for content - it is critical for traditional media businesses as there is not enough advertising to support these models anymore.

"Getting consumers to pay for content they value is key. We have to find those areas."

Such sentiments will be music to the ears of those operating in the embattled newspaper sector, which according to Sorrell's own media investment arm GroupM is expected to see advertising revenue plummet 26% in the UK this year.

But such apparent support for online pay-walls flies in the face of Sorrell's own vision of the future, announced less than 10 months earlier.

Addressing an international advertising event in January, there could be no mistaking what the WPP leader thought about the position traditional publishers now find themselves in, or his reservations about charging for web content.

"Some of the structural changes we're seeing taking place in the [newspaper] industry, particularly in America, the failure and bankruptcy and reorganisation of these [publishing] companies is going to continue. And there's no way of stopping it, because we've given it away for free," he said.

"The seeds of this problem were sown when the people who created the new media industry, probably in the early nineties, decided - rightly from the consumers point of view I have to say - to give it away for nothing.

"It's impossible actually now to take it up. You can start up here [high] and take your pricing down, but you can't start there [free] and start moving it up."

It appears News Corp's venerable leader's commitment to "charge for all our news websites", buoyed by thriving online subs at the Wall Street Journal, has led Sorrell to change his mind.

It marks the latest backtrack in what has been a tricky year for WPP's famous crystal ball-gazer, who, lest we forget, is responsible for group billings of more than $80 billion, or around a third of all the world's measured media buying.

At the same event in January, Sorrell predicted "a flat year" for the global ad market in 2009, adding reassuringly: "We're not looking at the Armageddon or the Apocalypse Now that analysts and media followers are forecasting.

"We don't see it as bad as Goldman and others who talk about -5, I see -10 from [some quarters] which seems somewhat strange."

Nine long months, a series of forecast revisions, and thousands of redundancies later, and Sorrell now accepts a drop of 5.5% is the most likely outcome.

But then it's been one of those years; also at the IAA event in January, media execs were expressing incredulity at the suggestion a former Russian spy was being bandied around as a potential buyer for London's Evening Standard.