Search results matching tag 'paid content'

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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Decision time in paid content (stuff starts happening)

255762 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:29:00 GMT

This week is officially deemed paid content week (again), but yesterday unlike most weeks things happened. The New York Times said it was struggling to decide; Emap came out and (boldly) said it's charging £150; and a VC guy said newspapers need less than 5% of customers to pay. Bonus.

Venture capitalist Dharmash Mistry, a former MD of Emap Consumer Media and Emap Performance, told MediaGuardian that national papers "need to convert less than 5% of web audience to pay model" for the whole thing to work in a move away from solely relying on advertising revenue.

Dharmash Mistry, who is now at venture capital firm Balderton Capital, said that national newspapers need to get about 3% to 4% of their online audience to pay £3 a month. That would cover the entire annual digital advertising revenue he estimated most groups currently make.

"On a like-for-like basis, if newspapers convert an order of magnitude of 3% to 4% unique users to a pay model – at roughly £3 a month or 10% of the monthly price of buying print editions daily – you could probably generate as much in revenue as is being made from total online ad revenue currently," Mistry told MediaGuardian.

Now less than 5% seems achievable doesn't it? Well, I think so, but the question is how is it achievable? What is the system that will most easily deliver you that cash? Is it micropayments, premium content areas, members clubs or subscriptions or, you know, something else entirely.

It is this issue that has the newspaper industry acting like shot putters trying to do the 110 metre hurdles.

No clearer was this illustrated than yesterday when the New York Times took it upon itself to air the internal struggle it has been having with the issue of paid content.

Bill Keller, the executive editor, said yesterday that the issue of charging had proved a much tougher and more complicated decision "than it seems to all the armchair experts".

"There is no clear consensus on the right way to go," Kellner said, but added that the paper was "within weeks of a decision".

The New York Times has been looking at this for many months and it is finding it hard to know which way to jump. Getting it wrong could be a serious setback even for one of the world's biggest newspapers.

What keeps newspaper executives awake at night is this: if you opt for one system, invest and roll it out and then find it doesn't work what do you do then? Answers in 140 characters to the usual address please.

While one former Emap director was espousing; one newspaper wringing its hands; the B2B arm of Emap dived off a cliff. This might be for Emap a bold and elegant act, worthy of an Olympic podium place, or it might well be a rash act of folly more akin to tombstoning.

This is what it has done as reported by Media Week: it will start introducing pay walls across its magazine websites, which include Drapers Record, Broadcast, Health Service Journal and Retail Week, within two weeks and will no longer giveaway online content. Wow.

First at the plate is Retail Week. It will introduce a pay wall on November 13 with others likely to follow later.

To be honest my feeling here is, and working for a rival B2B publisher I will try to be careful with my words, good luck with that one. I don't see a lot of reasons why much of its audience would pay much at all for the news driven content on its websites.

So much of what is in Retail Week, Broadcast and the others exists elsewhere on the web. And while it covers these industries well, that isn't I think anything like enough to persuade people to pay £150 of thereabouts in this climate. I could, of course, be totally wrong, but it will be interesting to watch all the same.

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Media owners and the move to paid content

1713999 — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:20:00 GMT

Well, it looks like they're going to give it a go. With display ad revenues not enough to make substantial, or indeed any, profit, according to a survey from the Association of Online Publishers, around 70% of online publishers in the newspaper, magazine or TV industries will pay for content online.

I believe that a lot of them will be heading for a fall. There are simply too many of these mass media dinosaurs providing content that is too similar and usually available for free somewhere else. But admittedly, there are some big brands here with sometimes over 200 years of audience building, so surely that will count for something?

The truth is that no one really knows but last week a paidContentUK/Harris Interactive poll showed that only 5% of people who read a news site at least once a month would pay for online access. Though if a free or discounted subscription to a printed paper were thrown in as well, that would rise to 48%. A huge leap. As a Guardian reader to has seen the price of the paper hit the £1 barrier for the first time, I find this idea is particularly appealing and as newspapers make far more money from advertising that cover price, it could be an option. Albeit surely quite a radical one.

In the Guardian last week Andrew Freeman, Harris's senior technology, media and telecoms consultant, said that this model of combining charges together for printed and digital content is "an interesting possible picture of the future": "The value of this type of reader, engaged with the content, and (because of the subscription structure) much more likely to be brand loyal, would be massively higher to advertisers. If newspapers can deliver this sort of model - combining the best of both media within a paid-for relationship, then the future will be more certain, but certainly different."

Unfortunately the bad news is that "when asked the maximum amount they would be prepared to pay, respondents who read a free news site at least once a month gave us [the poll] the lowest possible amount in each category - annual subscriptions under £10, a day pass costing under £0.25 and per-article fees of between 1p and 2p". I still believe that there are not enough newspapers readers that are loyal enough to a brand for all the current national brands to survive this change, and for those that survive this digital/print mixed subscription could be the way forward but these numbers don't really seem strong enough to prop up the bank balance of national newspapers, especially when ad revenues will be affected by the fall in traffic that will surely come from putting up a paywall.

Moreover, yesterday in the Guardian, the same poll asks about how those payments would manifest themselves and it would seem that the preferred method of carrying out this revolution (and it really is no less than that) is by no means decided.

53% of consumers said that they would prefer a subscription of up to a year which will upset the champions of the latest media wunderkind- the micro payment. Paying a few pence per article is the method that many have put forward as something more appealing to consumer especially since Google revealed a fortnight ago that they would roll out their out system of micro payments, possibly as an extension of Google Checkout, in a document sent to the Newspaper Association of America in response to a request for paid-content proposals that the association sent to several technology companies.

Freeman says, ""There's been a lot of buzz about micro-payment recently, and some prominent players, like Google, have moved into this field, but there are massive challenges: and not just technical ones. From a simple business point of view, micropayments are disproportionately expensive to administer until you have an enormous volume and value, it just won't be worthwhile. If consumers are going to give up their preference for single-subscription payments they can more easily check and monitor, they will need to have real confidence and trust in the brands they use. Micropayments will probably benefit only the very largest of companies."

Not good news for all but very few large scale media owners who want to make money from content. Long established institutions will fall before a system is settled upon, that much seems certain.