The cunning of Chairman Rupert keeps on trickling around the intertubes like a healthy dose of mercury in a serving of shark.
Those who bothered to care will remember 2009 as the year the Chairman and his minions stomped around, muttering about charging for content, declaring war on freeloaders, and Google, and anybody else who wouldn't cough up cash for the quality journalism laid out on a daily basis on the intertubes.
Yet it's that bastion of liberal thinking The New York Times that has jumped first and announced that from early 2011, it will charge frequent readers for access to its web site, while Chairman Rupert and his minions are still celebrating the holiday season.
The Times to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web Site tells the story, what there is to tell:
Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site without extra charge.
But executives of The New York Times Company said they could not yet answer fundamental questions about the plan, like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading. They stressed that the amount of free access could change with time, in response to economic conditions and reader demand.
Well of course the devil is in the detail, but you'd have to think the amount of free access and the cost of access are more than details. I guess that's why it will need a year of implementation, and why, rather than taking an off the shelf solution, the NYT has decided to build its system from scratch. So much for Steve Brill and Journalism Online and the 500 newspapers that allegedly signed up to the dream. (Steve Brill's Journalism Online venture signs 500 newspapers).
As an occasional user, it won't bother me that much - The Financial Times offers nonpaying readers up to 10 articles a month, and I regularly find myself unable to use up my monthly quota.
Any changes are sure to be closely watched by publishers and other purveyors of online content who scoffed at the notion of online charging until advertising began to plummet in 2007, battering visions of Internet businesses supported solely by ads. Few general-interest publications charge now, but many newspapers and magazines are studying whether to make the switch.
Still, publishers fear that income from digital subscriptions would not compensate for the resulting loss of audience and advertising revenue.
And there's the rub. How many trout will they be able to tickle into the basket, to make the exercise worthwhile? It's not as if the NYT hasn't already some kind of dubious track record:
This would not be the first time the company had tried an online pay model. In the 1990s it charged overseas readers, and from 2005 to 2007 the newspaper’s TimesSelect service charged for access to editorials and columns. TimesSelect attracted about 210,000 subscribers who paid $49.95 a year, but it was scrapped to take advantage of the boom in online advertising.
Well you do the maths. Fifty bucks a year by 200,000 gets you not much more than ten million. You'd need a lot more subscribers to begin to make a dent in the bottom line. Which emphasises the real problem for mainstream newspapers online, which is the way that internet advertising has migrated, disappeared or gone cheap skate, and why local rags such as Fairfax now feature heavily intrusive splashes as a way of suggesting to advertisers that they're getting bang for their buck.
But can you do intrusive advertising while charging for access? On the principle of pay TV, which offers all the tedium of advertising loaded free to air television while gouging a monthly subscription.
Whatever, the line in the sand announced by Rupert Murdoch has ironically been drawn in the end by the NYT, and with predictable reactions:
But others, including the Guardian, have said they will not charge internet readers and certain papers, such as London's Evening Standard, have gone further in abandoning readership revenue by making their print editions free.
The NYT's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, acknowledged that the move is a gamble: "This is a bet, to a certain degree, in where we think the web is going." (New York Times to charge readers for online content).
Following the news shares in the NYT fell four per cent in afternoon trading.
One thing's certain. The move got the media more excited than the punters.
The Washington Post, for example, shamelessly recycled the NYT story as its own, in New York Times to charge for Web access in 2011. Sure, they gilded the lily with a few other facts and fancies, but it reminds me of the press releases we used to write that would get picked up word perfect by a shamelessly lazy Murdoch press and plunked somewhere in the middle of the paper to fill up the spaces between the ads.
And what's the bet other news organisations would keep on shamelessly recycling any content behind the pay wall when they get the chance?
Well it's taken the NYT six months to announce a definitive move to make a move after its definitive announcement back in July last year that it would definitively make a move to charge for its content (New York Times to charge for online content). So the spiders in my purse are feeling safe for the moment.
Naturally the sceptics were out in some force, along with familiar riffs:
A Harris poll released earlier this month found that 77 percent said they wouldn't pay anything to read a newspaper's stories on the Web. Of those who indicated they were willing to be charged for access to content, 19 percent would pay between $1 and $10 a month. (here)
The survey also suggested that only 43 per cent of people surveyed said they read a newspaper each day, either in print or online, and the younger you are, the less you care.
And truth to tell, except for my interest in the loons that infest the columns of the commentariat, I'd be voting with my feet in the same way. It takes a perverse grit to keep on reading irritants, in the hope that the sand will produce a pearl in an otherwise dull oyster.
Will newspapers end up like public radio and television in the United States? With a few dedicated, determined subscribers helping out the freeloaders?
Who knows? What fascinates me is the way Chairman Rupert did all the barnstorming, and it was the NYT that got the spooks and charged out of the barn, as staff, wages and revenue continued to free fall through 2009.
What's the bet, as a canny poker player, that he'll continue to keep his cards close to his chest, while eyeing off the opposition?
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