Paywalls For Murdoch Bloggers?

"No. NO. N.O. Nope. Nah. Never. Ever."

By Darryl Mason

Yesterday, we had a look at the responses in comments at Andrew Bolt's blog to the announcement that Digital Rupert wants everyone to start paying to read his 'quality journalism', and presumably blogs as well.

Murdoch wants his star online writers to pay their way now, they have to prove their worth by showing that they have plenty of loyal readers who will fork over some cash to get access to their thoughts and insights and research.

When The Professional Idiot asked, whaddayathink? 99% of Boltoids responded "No!"

In short, the 'Step One : Gauge Public Reaction' exercise in slowly introducing thousands of Andrew Bolt readers to the 'You Will Pay!' model was a Total Fucking Disaster.

So then Tim Blair, casual blogger at the Daily Telegraph, took a shot at finding out if his readers will now pay for what they've been reading for years online for free.

According to Blair, the installation of pay walls across the Digital Rupert empire....

....might happen more rapidly than people expect. You all up for payin’?

Cue a Total Fucking Disaster Part 2 as dozens of Blair's most dedicated readers and commenters, those expected by Digital Ruper executives to be the likeliest to pay, crush dreams of healthily profitable blogging :

"The short answer is: never. I’ve never paid for on-line content and never will."

"Nope."

"No."

"No."

"Sorry, not paying. Ever."

"You all up for payin’? No."

"tell ‘em their dreaming."

"NO There are plenty of other free sites around."

"People won’t pay. They just won’t. It may suck, but there it is."

"I’d be disappointed if I was asked to pay for access to a blog and probably wouldn’t, with all due respects to your talents, Tim."

"No."

"Hell no"

"Nice blog you’ve got here, Tim. Pity if something should happen to it."

And my favourite :

"I’m getting a very strong 'Super League' vibe about this whole idea."

After dozens of utterly negative comments towards the possibility of Blair stepping behind a pay wall in Digital Rupert's NewsOTainment Online Fortress, Blair's very good friend 'WB' dropped by and, what a shock, announced that 'You Will Pay!' is damn good idea, actually :

"The point for Rupert I guess is that ad revenue is just not enough.

....he’s having to turn his mind to charging and I am having to turn my mind to paying for the content I access multiple times daily and currently for no more than my ISP and mobile phone charges.

I love online content. It rocks for the most part. And I think it has value that should be paid for to the authors and creators of it. So I kind of hope Rupert gets this up..."

'WB' was all but a lone voice backing 'You Will Pay!' in all those pages of negative comments :

"No. N.O. Hell, no."

"You all up for payin’? Nope!"

"Ha! Dream on."

"You all up for payin’?"

"Nope"

Tim Blair has the same fundamental problem that Andrew Bolt has. Their thousands of readers might yet come round to the idea of paying something each month or year to read their blogs, with plenty of incentives, but they most certainly will not pay while Bolt and Blair remain a part of the Digital Rupert empire.

Many Blair and Bolt readers have no love or loyalty for Murdoch, and they don't appear interested in the rest of Digital Rupert's world of content. They don't want their money being used by the Daily Telegraph and Courier Mail to denigrate society with celebrity porn filth and art wank, helping to fund the cursed leftie Obama & Al Gore faithful cheer squads they appear to believe have infested the news rooms of virtually all the Australian news media.

For someone who was in the vanguard of Australian bloggers back in the dark and turgid days of the early 2000s, this must be quite a monumental moment for Tim Blair. It's certainly an extremely significant event in the history of Australian blogging, for professional bloggers to turn to their audiences and hold out a permanent begging bowl.

But can the 'You Will Pay!' model be made to work?

The very concept of a blog has to change. It can't just be a text blog anymore. A 'You Will Pay!' site built around one journalist, or opinionist, will have to thumping with content, video, audio, decent search engines to trawl the archives, and plenty more to turn something that was free into something that costs money.

No readers of any Australian blogs seem to like the idea of the blogs they like being moved behind pay walls, and why should they? It clearly means a lot less other readers and commenters. The community of readers built up around a blog with lively comment threads will always be decimated by the shift from free to pay for access.

Like bloggers, prolific and verbose commenters love to know that the blog that they're spending time and thought commenting at is actually being read by more than a few dozen, or a few hundred, people.

These commenters like the big audience that a Bolt or Blair blog site provides. They're not going to have that behind pay walls. They know that. As many at Bolt and Blair's blogs have already pointed out, a 'You Wil Pay!' blog becomes like a private club, with limited attendance, and the same old people coming back every day until the club closes due to extreme boredom.

Seriously, what's the point of dropping landmine comments at Digital Rupert blogs baiting Stupid Lefties by claiming they frothingly fantasise about a four-way with Hitler, Stalin and Mao, if a pay wall means that no Stupid Lefties will be reading such witty utterances?

And to top it all off, there will also be no more anonymous or alias-only commenting under the Digital Rupert New Media Order. Tim Blair is also preparing his readers for that alarming prospect.

Regardless of whether pay walls go up around the Blair & Bolt blogs, a Digital Rupert ID system for commenting is on the cards. Digital Rupert wants to data-mine readers and give the information culled from registrations to advertisers and marketers. It's all part of the Digital Rupert strategy to allow advertisers to "target you across multiple platforms". Sounds painful.

To finish, another sampling of the 100-plus negative comments Blair received when he dared to ask his readers, folksy-style, "You all up for payin'?":

"Nope. Two things I would never pay for - and online news is one of them."

"Tim - I’m also going to have to say no. Sorry."

"I’m afraid not, Tim. For all the reasons listed above."

"You all up for payin’? HAHAHAHA......HAHAHAHAH....GASP.... HAHAHAH wait, you’re serious? nope"

"The concept of having to pay to read this blog is very amusing."

There's a lot of Murdoch execs, and journalists, who can't see the funny side of the prickly predicament they're now in.

A media empire is crumbling, gushing billions, losing audiences, and perhaps most crushingly for Rupert Murdoch himself, Losing Influence. Murdoch lost truckloads of money keeping The Australian in production through the 1980s and 1990s because he knew he could influence and control the government of the day with a national broadsheet read by the country's most powerful business leaders, politicians and ruling classes. Those days are over.

To save his fortune and his business, Murdoch will dare to lose one million online free readers to suck some bucks from 1000 who are willing to pay.

These are desperate end days for the Murdoch media empire.

Murdoch has to find readers who will pay. Millions of them around the world to stem the massive losses, even after he shuts down the printing presses for the last time.

And where are all these people who will pay to read what they used to get for free?

Nobody seems to know yet.

Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt went looking and they certainly couldn't find any.

Except for 'WB' of course.

Go Here For More Stories On Digital Rupert, Paywalls And The Fall Of Newspapers

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Digital Rupert Clings To Old 20th Century Habits & Hubris

By Darryl Mason

A few more quotes from Rupert Murdoch on why he's so confident enough people will pay to read his kind of news so as to stop his whole empire from plummeting like the Twin Towers.

"Quality journalism is not cheap."

Yes, we all agree on that. Very true. No-one can argue with that.

Or maybe Rupert just found out that his News Of The World has paid out a couple of million to people its journalists spied on, getting busted in the process. That's expensive 'journalism'. But is it 'quality journalism?

Or dodgy as all fuck?

So what other kind of quality journalism does Digital Rupert think will pull in the bucks from the online news reading public?

"When we have a celebrity scoop, the number of hits we get now are astronomical."

Okay, so he's banking on the collapsed celebrity media market to save his empire. It won't happen. There is no lock on information and news anymore. Put it behind a pay wall and it will just take a few more minutes longer to find its way into the public domain.

Any even minor-interest celebrity news is all across Twitter and Facebook and a thousand other blogs, social networking sites and indie media, often faster than anyone in the Murdoch media can get in front of a keyboard. Any spectacular or juicy details of 'How Bastard Brad Broke Weepy Jen's Heart, Again!' will be everywhere, regardless of pay walls and copyright.

And Digital Rupert aims to protect those 'Rampaging Sex Addicted Football Star Cuts Off Own Penis'-type stories from being duplicated and circulated.

"We'll be asserting our copyright at every point."

He's dreaming. Copyright is dead.

What if someone who witnesses a terrible disaster or terrorist attack demands to be cut in for some of the revenue generated by what Digital Rupert believes will the kinds of big stories that people will pay to read online? What if everyone interviewed by a Murdoch journalist decided to "retain their copyright" until they saw some cash. What then?

The whole You Will Pay! digital media devolution has begun, and for news junkies and media flunkies alike, it will be fascinating to see how it unfolds.

But it's not going to put a lot of bloggers and independent news sites out of business. If anything, the blocking of access to Murdoch news sites will increase traffic to those who Free Publish.

There's no law against someone reporting what a journalist has reported behind a corporate media pay wall.

Not yet anyway.

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Who Just Lost Another Few Billion Trying To Convince You That Celebrities Are Important And That People Who Don't Look Like You Can't Be Trusted?

Witnessing The Death Throes Of An Old Media Dinosaur

By Darryl Mason

A short round-up of the global losses of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, culled from this story :

* News Corporation net loss in 12 months - $US3.4 billion.

* Full year operating profit drops by 32%

* Growth in cable TV fails to compensate for massive losses in films, books, magazines, newspapers.

* In April/May/June quarter 2009, News Corp. smashed by $203 million in losses. In comparison, same quarter 2008 saw $1.1 billion profit.

* Advertising revenue for Murdoch's British papers - The Sun, The Times, News Of The World - plunged by 14%.

* Murdoch's 20th Century Fox film division, profits slumped from $1.24 last year to $848 million this year.

* Profits from Murdoch's Fox TV division - US, UK, Asia - were slashed by more than 80%.

No wonder ex-Australian Rupert Murdoch was reading, grimly, by phone, from a prepared statement when he tried to explain to shareholders that while the news about News Corp. was shockingly bad, next year was looking better because he intended to make people....umm....pay to read the news online.

Pay to read the news online? Who didn't laugh when they heard that the first time? This is a visionary strategy to save a massive global corporation from destruction?

Who is this crazy old man and what has he done with the Dirty Digger?

Stephen Mayne, the founder of the profitable online news site, Crikey, was interviewed on ABC Midday News on Thursday, as news broke of the ex-Australian's media empire being blitzed by billions in losses.

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"The problem Rupert has got is that he is in the dinosaur industry of newspapers"

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Mayne doesn't necessarily think that the ex-Australian will be left completely fucked and bombed by the 'You Will Pay!' experiment, but it's not looking good. Mayne believes the Murdoch product soon to be for sale is not good enough, and Murdoch will always be ten steps from disaster as long as he continues printing actual newspapers.

"I think for Rupert Murdoch to declare that the Herald Sun, the Daily Telegraph, every one of his newspapers in the world, and he is the world's biggest newspaper owner, for them all to charge is a very risky proposition," Mayne said. "And I predict they won't get much revenue, and they'll simply lose a whole heap of (reader) traffic."

Mayne said Murdoch's biggest problem was not simply convincing people to read Pay To Read online, but to give them enough reasons to want to pay.

"A lot of what Rupert does isn't particularly high quality, and if there's other high quality material from Fairfax, or other rivals in Britain and the US, that is still free, then everyone will just go to their websites. So you can only charge if (all the other news media) is charging and if your content is particularly fantastic," Mayne said.

"So the big challenge for Rupert, is to round up all the big newspaper publishers around the world and to get them to all collude and agree to change the business model. And that will be very hard given they all compete so aggressively."

The ex-Australian will continue to suffer while he clings to the 20th century.

"The problem Rupert has got is that he is in the dinosaur industry of newspapers," Mayne said.

"The industry is collapsing, his advertising revenue is down 20% across the board. Google has cut everybody's lunch. And i think the only real way he can get out of it is to get companies like Google to start paying him money in return for aggregating their content. Get everyone together, start charging, and then do a big deal with Google to try and scoop up some of their billions in annual advertising revenue derived from aggregating newspaper content."

Doing away with actual newspapers, Mayne predicts, will be an inevitable part of returning Big Media to shareholder-applauding profit. That is, if profits enough to survive are even possible again for a corporation as large and expensive and bloated with seven figure executives as Murdoch's News Corp.

"I think newspapers...it's a dying industry," Mayne said.

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"Publishers have been screwing advertisers for 100 years. Technology has now turned the tables"

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Economist Alan Kholer says Rupert Murdoch is crashing and burning because advertising income online compared to print has proved to be so gaping :

....who was to know that the price of online advertising would settle at about a tenth of the price of print advertising?

This is, after all, a classic business event: a technological change that causes a price reduction. And the result is always the same - lower costs.

While absurdly high print advertising prices (in print) have subsidised large editorial budgets, and low or zero cover prices, it won’t do it online.

It is the fact that the price of advertising has collapsed. Murdoch’s real problem is that the balance of power between publishers and advertisers has entirely flipped.

Advertisers and their agencies now rule the roost. They refuse to pay more than a tenth or so per unit of what they pay in print, and they demand much better service, such as only paying for actual new customers, not simply for “branding” that can’t be measured.

And why shouldn’t they act this way? The publishers have been screwing them for a hundred years, charging outrageous prices to access their treasured audiences. Technology has now turned the tables.

We are merely witnessing the death throes of an oligopoly’s hubris.

An editorial in Crikey ouchingly brands the newspapers Murdoch clings to as "legacy media" :

"...this is all a gigantic gamble by desperate newspaper owners to plug the deep cracks in their business models that have turned newspapers from 20th century money machines into 21st century legacy media.

Saying that quality journalism is not cheap to produce is self-evident. But the fundamental problem for most quality newspapers is not that people aren’t paying for that journalism, it’s that advertisers — especially classified advertisers — have found a better and cheaper medium than newspapers. And it’s the advertisers, not the readers, who pay for the quality journalism that made newspapers so profitable and powerful.

Unless readers are prepared to replace the lost classified advertising revenues — which in the case of a newspaper like The Sydney Morning Herald would require every buyer to pay something like $250 a year extra for the content — the problem of funding quality journalism won’t be solved.

I've been a newspaper junkie since my early teens. I brought 2 or 3 newpapers a day, every day, for decades, until about 3 years ago. Now I only regularly buy weekend newspapers.

I spent about $10 on newspapers last weekend, and except for a Louis Nowra piece in The Australian, most of the weekend paper pile remains unread. I read most of the news elsewhere online, the day before. I can barely bother to read columnists like Greg Sheridan, Philip Adams, Miranda Devine and Sun Herald, Sunday Telegraph and The Australians editorials, online, let alone devoting offline time to getting through them.

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It seems an unimaginable reality. What do you mean they don't print newspapers anymore?

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None of the weekend papers feel essential anymore. It doesn't feel like I'm going to miss out if I don't buy them and read them comprehensively. When I was in my early 20s, I often chose buying newspapers over buying Saturday morning breakfast. The idea of doing that now seems insane.

There are probably thousands of bloggers, and dozens of indie media sites, run by juiced New Media 20-somethings, who snort and cackle and giggle with delight at what is happening to the old corporate media these days, and some seem to take a particular delight in believing that actual newspapers won't be found some day soon in racks at the 7-11, or piling up the gutters on windy days.

It's seems an unimaginable reality. What do you mean they don't print newspapers anymore?


You had to wait for the newspaper once. You had to wait for it to go on sale, or for the newsagent to open. There was many a 2am Saturday or Sunday morning when I haunted all night newsagents in Kings Cross or Central Station (coming home from work, or from seeing gigs) hassling to get bundles cut open so I could get what I wanted and rush home to read them before sleep overwhelmed.

Now I can just read all that vital news on an iPhone as I stumble home instead.

And if there are days when I can't be bothered to visit online news sites, let alone pick up an actual paper, I'm confident that the array of writers, journos, media junkies, I follow on Twitter will alert me to plenty of quality news from all over the world, including much that I would never bothered to read had they not recommended it.

And Twitter is the nail through the palms of all the big, vastly expensive news media online today. Murdoch execs in particular still seem to have no idea what this instant news sharing system is going to become. None of them dare to say the word 'Twitter' out loud right now, even as they loudly repeatedly denounce the legitimate competition for eyeballs and attention from one person blogs, as they attempt to degrade and discredit the credibility of a thrilling storm of independent New News Media.

"You need us to tell you what's going on."

Really? Do we?

It doesn't feel like that anymore.

All media execs are terrified of Twitter. Trying to fit a chunk of news or info into just 140 character posts is is training millions how to write clearly, succinctly. Twitter is training people in how to reduce an explanation of what is happening to them, or people they know, or people they've just read about, into a handful of words. Experienced twooters can compress a 1200 word front page story in The Australian to its most essential facts spread across a couple of posts.

If you want to know the latest news on anything, tossing subject key words into the Twitter search engine more often than not delivers you the very latest on the news you're interested in, sometimes literally a minute or less after it happens.

The idea that the average person needs a journalist, or a columnist, to explain to them what is happening in their local community, their city or state, their country, to interpret and filter information, feels very 20th century.

As 20th century as that file pile of weekend newspapers a few feet from me, that now feel like more of a chore than a pleasure to leaf through.

I live without daily newspapers now, and I'm sure I've almost been rehabbed enough by a world of online news to dump the weekend newspaper habit as well.

If the Old Media now so desperately trying to save itself from financial ruin and irrelevancy can't convince a full-blown news junkie like me to buy their gear in print or online, what hope do they have to convince the majority who have only a casual news habit?

I feel absolutely no devotion or allegiance to any Old Media. What do they serve up that I can't get elsewhere online, if not immediately, then a bit later from elsewhere?

I'd rather pay Fairfax columnist Annabel Crabbe $30 a year to write her columns for her own blog and then alert me to those stories via Twitter than to pay Fairfax $100 or more a year for a whole slew of content I don't want, don't need, won't read. If Crabbe charged, say, $60 a year and mailed me a book she'd either written or one she highly recommended, I'd sign up tomorrow.

To me, the biggest problem the Old Media in Australia, all over the world, face right now is overcoming the dawning reality that they are no longer essential.

The monopoly on information and news enjoyed for so long by a handful of media corporations has been smashed by the Big Free, by thousands of blogs and independent news sites and comment boards on MySpace and on aggregators (and summarisers) like Digg and Reddit and free access forums on anything you can imagine, contemplate or question.

Information and news is Free, and that cannot be changed back now. No matter what former gods of public manipulation and opinion shaping like Rupert Murdoch try and do, the sharing of news and information can never go back to what it once was.

Those days are over.

Curiously, while the media giants are being stripped by market forces of their wealth and influence, there are plenty of blogs and independent news media who are doing very well for themselves right now, and free information exchangeries like Twitter only help to expand their online audiences.

When the true desperation sets in for media giants like Murdoch, and it wont be long now, the real down and nasty war against all that enthusiastically free competition from bloggers and indie news sites will begin. And it will be an ugly.

And pathetic.


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