Adding Fees and Fences on Media Sites
Monday, December 28th, 2009
- Image via Wikipedia
Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free.
Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close.
Newspapers, including this one, are weighing whether to ask online readers to pay for at least some of what they offer, as a handful of papers, like The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, already do. Indeed, in the next several weeks, industry executives and analysts expect some publications to take the plunge.
Rupert Murdoch, beyond charging for access to The Journal, has talked about forming a partnership with a single search engine, which would pay him for the rights to scour the news and entertainment programming produced by his company, the News Corporation, rather than letting all search engines crawl his sites. Also Hulu, which is owned partly by Mr. Murdoch’s company, is considering charging viewers to watch some of the TV shows it now streams free.
Magazine publishers, meanwhile, have banded together to try to create their own version of the iTunes store, aiming for a day when they can sell enhanced versions of what they have been giving away. And more and more media companies are planning to charge for apps on iPhones and other mobile devices, as well as on the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers.
Media companies of all stripes built their business models on the assumption that advertising would continue to pour into their coffers. But with advertising in a tailspin, they now must shrink, shut down or find some way to shift more of the cost burden to consumers — the same consumers who have so blissfully become accustomed to Web content that costs nothing.
So will future consumers look back on 2010 as the year they finally had to reach into their own pockets?
Industry experts have their doubts, saying that pay systems might work, but in limited ways and only for some sites. Publishers who sounded early this year as though they were raring to go have not yet taken the leap, and the executives who advocate change tend to range from vague to cautious in making any predictions about fundamentally changing the finances of their battered businesses.
But one thing clearly has shifted already, in a year rife with magazine closures and newspaper bankruptcies: conventional wisdom among media companies has swung hard from the belief that pay walls would only curb traffic and stifle ad revenue, to the view that media businesses need to try something new, because the current path appears to lead to extinction.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Rupert Murdoch, Google & the Case for Paid Content (redcouch.typepad.com)
- How much unique content is out there? (earleyedition.com)
- Murdoch threatens to yank News Corp. from Google News (theregister.co.uk)
- The Only Workable Revenue Model for the Web Is Trust (conversationagent.com)
- Bing/News Corp: Not a Game Changer (blogs.forrester.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=9e41af1d-3aca-4797-8316-8ba5e9f5ac75)
Random Posts:
- Environmentally-friendly Energy: Sunlight Turns Carbon Dioxide To Methane
- The quietest Orange County Chopper yet: the electric Siemens Smart Chopper
- EVs to get improved mileage from redox flow batteries
- Calera and Novacem use concrete to capture CO2
- Creating Wireless Network Using Visible Light
2. Right-Click then Copy
3. Paste the HTML code into your webpage
Related posts:
