Murdoch: Web sites to charge for content: “”

I recently cancelled our Sky satellite subscription (Sky is owned by News Corporation) because I didn’t see the wisdom of paying for a TV service and then having to sit through some 15 – 20 minutes of adverts in every hour.

Now Murdoch is saying he expects News Corporation owned newspaper websites will move to a subscription model within a year.
I have news for him. It’s been tried before, and it didn’t work too well. It’s bad enough suffering some of the insidious adverts that are currently embedded in news websites, but I’m damned if I’m going to pay as well.

I know the newspaper industry is being hit hard by the web, the recession and consequent downturn in advertising revenues, News Corporation announced a 47 percent slide in quarterly profits to $755 million, but web users are not used to paying for content, especially when there are plenty of other free sources of news on the web.

To suggest the existing internet business model is “malfunctioning” is too sweeping a statement. There will always be people willing to pay for specific content, but a much larger percentage will not pay. So a tiered structure of free and paid for content will probably be the way forward.

It’s debatable though if anyone would be prepared to pay for some of News Corps. titles. Would you pay a subscription to read The Sun online?