It's understandable that News Corp wants to generate a better revenue model for their media outlets but this is going to be a tough sell. They cite the Wall Street Journal (a site that already charged when News Corp purchased it) as the model but there's a big difference between one specialized site versus all of them. There's too much competition today in the industry and not enough single source, original information online. Of course, part of Murdoch's strategy has always been to wipe out competition. Look at the state of the media in Australia where News Corp owns the market.
The sites that charge (like the WSJ and the FT) are easily passed by and the information can be found quickly enough. Again, I get the need to generate revenue - News Corp has been hammered along with the media in general - but this doesn't sound like the future. This sounds more in line with the old days when a few outlets tried forcing users to pay for subscriptions. It's possible it will work in the near term but over time, maybe not. I guess I'll just have to try and live without the high quality available on News Corp sites around the world.
Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation's newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a "malfunctioning" business model.
Encouraged by booming online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal, the billionaire media mogul last night said that papers were going through an "epochal" debate over whether to charge. "That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal's experience," he said.
Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, he replied: "We're absolutely looking at that." Taking questions on a conference call with reporters and analysts, he said that moves could begin "within the next 12 months‚" adding: "The current days of the internet will soon be over."
