Ron's personal timeline, a place to collect and share things from Ron's life.
Created by ronnussey on May 17, 2009
Last updated: 03/11/10 at 09:35 PM
The Guardian is to hire a manager to run a planned readers' club that could build a new revenue stream for the paper.
Offered as a one-year contract, the job is advertised in the MediaGuardian print section and on its website today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/24/guardian-readers-club
Andrew Clark meets the Arkansas publisher charging for online news - and making a profit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/23/online-news-charging-us-publishing
News Corporation executives have met counterparts from rival newspapers including the New York Times and Washington Post to discuss forming a consortium to charge for online news content, according to a US report today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/21/news-corp-online-news-consortium
Mark Cuban to Rupert Murdoch: "Rupert , you didn’t ask my opinion on this, but since when has that ever stopped me."
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/08/08/my-advice-to-fox-myspace-on-selling-content-yes-you-can/
Why are Rupert Murdoch and other news organisations moving to charge for online content?
The recession has caused a dramatic drop in print and online advertising, one of the main sources of income for news organisations. Murdoch, other media owners and journalists all believe that readers online have been getting a free ride. News organisations need to find a new source of revenue to replace the decline in advertising.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/06/charging-online-content-murdoch-faqs
The billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch suffered the indignity of seeing his global empire make a huge financial loss yesterday and promptly pledged to shake up the newspaper industry by introducing charges for access to all his news websites, including the Times, the Sun and the News of the World, by next summer.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/06/rupert-murdoch-website-charges
I have a confession: the news paywall debate irritates me. It irritates me, because this discussion was had years ago, and discussed with a great deal of depth and intelligence across the emergent publishing and journalism blogosphere. And then it was promptly ignored by the majority of the publishing industry because they didn't think that print was in any danger.
http://www.onemanandhisblog.com/archives/2009/07/we_never_sold_journalism.html
A few months ago I suggested Waitrose as a solution to the problem of finding a new business model for journalism. I was trying to make a more general point about journalism being delivered in different ways but I am increasingly convinced that I may have hit upon something, partly thanks to some interesting comments from a clever chap at Stanford.
http://www.charliebeckett.org/?p=1688
You only get to launch a product or service or piece of featured content once. Is the best way to maximize economic yield to make it free or paid? If it is free is can spread far and get many links, but it does not produce any revenue directly. If it is paid a much smaller audience will see it, and potentially one of them will be a competitor who will recycle your work and make it public to pull in links (I can’t tell you how common that is). I like the idea of trying to blend the free and paid ideas to get most of the benefits of free while actually being able to profit from your work.
http://searchengineland.com/blending-free-paid-content-to-maximize-visibility-and-profit-23175
Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) is planning to spin several specialist content sites off its core newspaper sites in the next few months. MirrorFootball.co.uk is already planned and Thursday morning’s earnings report revealed plans for a 3am.co.uk celeb gossip site. CEO Sly Bailey has one eye on charging for parts of those sites - but that’s some way off…
http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-trinitys-bailey-paid-content-may-be-the-next-stage-but-audience-comes-f/
There's a lot of discussion out there about how online content should be monetized.
In particular, the newspaper industry is doing a lot of soul searching for the right revenue model. For many publications, particularly legacy publications with higher cost models, advertising alone isn't covering the nut.
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/07/monetize-the-audience-not-the-content.html
The paid-for model is the key to reviving the deteriorating newspaper industry, according to some panellists at MediaTel Group's 'Future of National Newspapers' seminar yesterday.
http://www.mediatel.co.uk/?newslink=/newsline/2009/07jul/17/newspapers.cfm&CFID=8558760&CFTOKEN=55928447
Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, has gone out on a limb and predicted that "almost all" news sites will be charging for access to their content within a year.
Almost all? Really? Seriously? I'll have whatever he's smoking.
http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2009/07/you-cant-charge-for-something-that-doesnt-provide-value.html
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Similarly, if your website is behind a paywall and doing relatively well, it must be tempting to believe that everyone’s problems can be solved the same way.
At an event last night Lionel Barber, the Financial Times editor, said: “But I confidently predict that within the next 12 months, almost all news organisations will be charging for content.”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100002217/the-newspaper-paywall-argument-still-doesnt-make-sense/
The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that "almost all" news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.
Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the key challenges facing news organisations.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jul/16/financial-times-lionel-barber
You say they won’t pay for content online? They, if we mean consumers, do indeed pony up their credit cards regularly for online content—yes, even content from magazine brands. As we gear up for our own June 21 Webinar on “Cracking the Code” of paid content, we wanted to call out five models not everyone knows about yet. Each bears watching as publishers contemplate how to make digital media pay.
http://www.minonline.com/news/Top-5-Paid-Models-Worth-Watching_11526.html
The New York Times is preparing the ground to start charging for its news online, asking readers if they would be willing to pay between $30 and $60 a year to access its website.
The publisher disclosed that it was considering a $5 monthly fee for online access in a survey of readers. It asked print subscribers whether they would be willing to pay a discounted rate of $2.50 a month.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7aa2c17c-6cda-11de-af56-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss
The notion of Rupert Murdoch as the saviour of newspapers may be unpalatable. But if the industry does survive the current turmoil, albeit largely in digital form, it will almost certainly have the 78-year-old News Corporation chairman and chief executive to thank.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/06/newspapers-web-free-charge
Although not the inventor, the chief evangelist of the “free” world is author and Wired editor Chris Anderson. Last year, before the recession hit, Anderson outlined his upcoming book in a cover story titled “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.” A year and a half later, the final subtitle was changed to a less pretentious “The Future of a Radical Price,” “mostly because ‘why X is the future of business’ is now a cliche,” Anderson tells me.
http://gigaom.com/2009/07/03/maybe-paid-is-the-future-of-online-business/
Tuesday's blog explosion about the arguments for and against free web content were caused in part by Malcom Gladwell's (author of 'Outliers' and 'Blink') review of a new book on the subject of free content by WIRED magazine's Chris Anderson in The New Yorker.
http://econsultancy.com/blog/4135-the-economics-of-free-web-content?utm_medium=email&utm_source=topic
... When [Anderson] talks about pets for penguins, he is referring to the Disney's online game Club Penguin. This is free to play, but they have premium memberships that provide players with additional features. Based on the ideas of his new book Free, he says that newspapers must decide what they provide for free and what premium content and services that they can develop to make money.
Business to business publisher Emap Inform is planning to charge users to access "significant parts" of its websites with effect from September or October, according to a report.
http://www.brandrepublic.com/BrandRepublicNews/News/915968/Major-B2B-publisher-introduce-paywalls/?DCMP=EMC-DailyNewsBulletin
Earlier this year the New York Times said it was looking at options for charging for online content. It is now looking at charging for its mobile phone content ahead of any moves it makes on the web.
http://www.brandrepublic.com/DigitalAM/News/915784/New-York-Times-looks-mobile-charge-content/?DCMP=EMC-Digital-AM-Bulletin
Journalism Online, planning to sell news online is hoping to get money from about 10 percent of Internet readers accustomed to mostly free access to newspaper and magazine Web sites since the 1990s.
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090624/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_online_news_fees
NEW YORK -- Media and entertainment industry executives said here Tuesday that consumers will be willing to pay for popular digital content as more sector companies explore new online pay models.
Les Hinton, CEO of News Corp.'s Dow Jones & Co. and publisher of the Wall Street Journal, said newspaper firms' mistake was to give content away for free on the Web for too long, which allowed Google to become a kind of digital vampire.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/technology/news/e3i0849a35b3cfeb8594b319dc4f5199581
An interesting tidbit from yesterday’s MediaFinance conference, via Journalism.co.uk - Absolute Radio COO Clive Dickens is mulling over asking listeners whether they would pay £10 a year for ad-free online radio streaming.
“Some percentage of our community will pay for content,” he said, but Dickens says any eventual launch would be just one plank of a mixed-model strategy that would continue to depend on ad support.
http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-mediafinance-absolute-radio-time-out-mull-paid-content-additions
LONDON - Advertisers could gain an affluent, engaged and highly targeted audience if newspaper websites introduce subscription charges, according to experts.
http://www.revolutionmagazine.com/DigitalPM/News/914690/Paid-for-web-content-benefit-brands/?DCMP=EMC-Media-PM-Bulletin
AOP Case Study on which.co.uk, which has increased its paying subscriber base online through difficult economic times.
http://www.ukaop.org.uk/digitalshowcase/whichpaidcontentonlinecasestudy.html
Information may want to be free, but InterActiveCorp's chairman thinks we're all going to be paying for it soon...
http://econsultancy.com/blog/4005-the-internet-is-passing-out-of-its-free-phase?utm_medium=email&utm_source=topic
Listening to news executives talk about micropayments, Kindles, public subsidies, micropayments, collusion, blocking Google and anything else that might save their businesses, it occurs to me that they may have missed some developments in, ah, well, the past ten years. For those and anyone else who is interested, I offer the following primer on how things have changed.
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/06/04/how-the-web-changed-the-economics-of-news-in-all-media/
"Newspapers are to some extent responsible for their current situations, but the real underlying problem is that they are mature products facing declining demand because many other news and information products have been launched that do some of their tasks more effectively for consumers."
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/shane_richmond/blog/2009/05/21/interview_professor_robert_g_picard_on_the_future_of_newspapers
"Publishers know that their only hope of charging for anything that is not unmissable is to co-operate, even to form a single portal via which publishers would sell their content to consumers and Google. However, in such a competitive sector, that doesn't sound very likely."
http://www.brandrepublic.com/InDepth/Opinion/906523/Andrew-Walmsley-Digital-lesson-co-operation/
"Attempts to force the internet to adapt to offline business models are doomed to failure. Just look up the history of music sharing online if you want an example of how the internet adapts to attempts to control it. The network will find a way."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/18/internet-future
Jack Matthews, Fairfax Digital: "The thing I will say about Murdoch's comment, I think he has very forcefully put (online pay structure) on the agenda for discussion." Free access to information isn't free. For this story alone, there were the long-distance calls, computers, electricity, wages, health benefits and at least two Starbucks lattes (grande size) involved.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/05/18/online.pay/
But “pay walls” alone are not going to save the industry. Even The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, whose Web sites are perhaps the best examples of paid-for digital news, generate only small fractions of their budgets from Internet subscriptions. For general publications — which, according to surveys, will have a harder time getting online readers to pay — pay walls may just be a transitional step. To develop more viable online business models they will have to take a broader look at where money is actually made on the Internet. E-commerce sites like eBay and Amazon.com aside, there are two main sources: Search engines, which sell billions of dollars’ worth of advertising, and Internet service providers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/business/media/18iht-cache18.html?_r=1
According to Mr Grimshaw, the answer is that a “free evangelist movement [convinced] everybody that the internet was somehow different and any attempt to impose a business model was an imposition on people’s human rights”. Changing that perception will mean nothing less than challenging the culture of the internet as we currently understand it.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d0960f18-4303-11de-b793-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1
Hoping to gain revenue at its popular video-sharing site, Google wants to let users download and subscribe to video, possibly paid through small, instant purchases known as micropayments.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=477012
What would be useful in this debate about whether newspapers should withdraw their content behind pay walls is some data. Fortunately, PricewaterhouseCoopers is on hand to provide some, having interviewed almost 5,000 people in seven countries. Of course, the problem with statistics is that they can be used to prove anything you like.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/shane_richmond/blog/2009/05/14/news_pay_walls_consumer_says_no
Lifestyle media maven Martha Stewart said Thursday her namesake company will test a paid download model for access to a portion of its vast library of online video content next month.
http://www.smartmoney.com/news/ON/?story=ON-20090514-000657-1426
this was certainly a week for paid content... After months of speculation that online newspapers could begin to charge, News Corp (NYSE: NWS) and Guardian Media Group confirmed they were at least examining such options. We’ll wait to see how far they get on that, but here’s how the story played out for us over the last week…
http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-week-in-paid-content/
MediaNews said it will stop reproducing all its print content online, meaning that some stories will only appear in the newspapers. Second, online content will be crafted to reach a younger audience; and third, online users who are not subscribed to the print edition will be required to register and pay a fee to read stories online.
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=106036
In these circumstances, there are two courses of action: sink your head into the sand, wail "Woe is me" and wait for the death of media as we know it - or be proactive and positive and look for the bright spots of optimism that exist if you look hard enough. If I know anything about this industry, it's the latter option that will be picked up and run with.
http://community.brandrepublic.com/blogs/steve_barretts_blog/archive/2009/05/13/media-must-stay-positive-and-find-spots-of-optimism.aspx
"Maybe there is a way around the current lunacy. I certainly hope so. Until or unless someone works out how to monetise online readers in their existing numbers, newspapers will continue to weaken. Much as I would like to, I don't think charging is the big idea. "
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/opinion/stephen-glover/stephen-glover-the-press-must-stop-this-lunacy-of-giving-content-away-for-free-1682510.html
It’s impossible to fund an online content business through ads alone, and the return of paidcontent could benefit the whole industry, according to FT.com publisher Rob Grimshaw.
http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-interview-rob-grimshaw-publisher-ft.com-newspapers-must-add-paid-conten/
Consumers who have grown up during the past 15 years are completely at home in a world where much of what they want to hear, see or read will cost them nothing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/10/music-news-murdoch-free-google
The worsening advertising climate is forcing many publishers, facing only modest online gains after a decade of digital investment, to consider charging for content...But there are risks and challenges - here’s a rundown…
http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-why-raising-the-pay-wall-may-be-an-impossible-dream/
"If print media executives want to keep pace with the social revolution, they need to begin by letting go of the outdated assumption that their job is to first filter and then broadcast information for the public good. From now on, we'll decide what matters, thank you very much, and if newspapers know what's good for them, they'll do what they can to not get in the way."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/may/07/rupert-murdoch-newspapers-internet
Carolyn McCall, chief executive of Guardian Media Group, has revealed that the newspaper publisher is considering charging for content in some specialist areas of Guardian.co.uk.
http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/903114/Guardian-considers-charging-content/
Someone had to make a statement about charging for content and media veteran Steve Brill's Journalism Online venture has. It hopes to charge for content online on behalf of newspaper and magazine publishers as well as deal with licensing of content. It's big news. It might be the start of something.
http://community.brandrepublic.com/blogs/gordons_republic/archive/2009/04/16/steve-brill-s-big-idea-putting-paid-content-to-the-test.aspx
UK web users prefer to view ads online or on mobiles if this means they will get content for free, according to a new survey.
The study, conducted by professional services group KPMG, indicates that some 60% of Brits people would rather watch advertising on the internet in return for free content, rather than pay for it.
http://www.netimperative.com/netimperative/news/2009/april/brits-2018prefer-adverts-to-paid-for-content2019
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