Can online publishers monetise online content. Rupert Murdoch is leading the charge will it happen or work?
A recent NMA article “News Corp to build online news consortium” is just one of many stories about how the online publishing community is trying to reverse engineer paid for content into an essentially free online content model.
Now that the print and TV market are not making the sorts of revenue they were in the past, and the online business model is not sufficient to sustain the companies without the offline revenues publishers are desperately trying to evaluate additional revenue opportunities
The micro charging model (e.g. charging a nominal amount for news content, video content etc), or a straight subscription model seem to be the two main choices that publishers are weighing up.
There seems to be a believe that because the likes of The Wall Street Journal and FT charge for certain online content means it is a simple matter of transferring this model to other publisher sites. What everyone seems to be forgetting, or at least not addressing, is these are essentially sites used and expensed by businessmen to make sure they are constantly up-to-date with the world’s financial and business news.
Is Joe Blogg’s going to pay to read news on times online when he can get it free from BBC or have it sourced by bloggers or aggregators? This is probably the question keeping publishers up at night. Also will the money they get from the payment model be offset by the loss of revenue from advertising when their user base falls off a cliff?
The truth is if major publishers decide to charge for their content they need to be joined up. This is why the below article is interesting as it seems that the visionaries from the offline media giants realise they need to be joined up in order to push this through. After all if News Int charge for its content and Telegraph and Guardian don’t what are the odds that rafts of users migrate to get their news from a free service?
No one will know the answer until it has been tested but all of the signs are that it will be happening, sooner rather than later, and only then will we see how the consumer reacts and whether the future is paid for online content or whether the voice of the people will push it to stay free.
