According to a recent study, we’re not overly impressed with Rupert Murdoch’s plans to charge for use of his on the web news websites. Of 2,000 individuals asked if they would ever pay for on the internet news, 9 out of 10 said ‘No!’. Does that imply that Murdoch’s decision to charge users to access his news websites is foolish?

I wouldn’t pay for news, either, unless…

If I were asked ‘would you ever pay for online news?’, I would probably say ‘no’, too. Right after all, in an age when we can commonly study about key events on Twitter prior to any of the news channels report them, why would we ever want pay for access to their content?

Even so, I would, and normally do, spend for excellent and ‘luxury’ news. I would never pay a penny for one particular of the shrinking quantity of free of charge newspapers handed out on my way to perform in a morning, but I would pay for a Sunday broadsheet with all its extras and trimmings (even even though the possibilities of me truly reading much more than a handful of pages are extremely compact).

I have also been known to sign up to a paid members’ region on the web site of a particular football team (which shall stay nameless) to get access to additional content not readily available on the most important website: video interviews and press conferences, highlights of reserve and youth group matches, live radio commentary on match days.

Would I pay to read The Sun on the net? No. There are generally only about two paragraphs in every single image-dominated article anyway. It only charges a couple of pennies to get the genuine factor so there would not be a great deal value in working with its website. The Times? Maybe, but only if all other quality news outlets starting charging, otherwise I’d just go for the absolutely free 1.

Utilizing a Credit Card for a 20p Report?

I’m not sure how significantly Mr Murdoch desires to charge his users to study an article, but I am guessing there is going to be some sort of account that wants setting up. I certainly could not be bothered to get my wallet out each time I wanted to study something and I would be extremely hesitant to commit to subscribing.

On the other hand, if they had a comparable technique to iTunes, whereby you just enter your password to acquire access to a paid write-up and your card is billed accordingly, that may possibly make a bit a lot more sense. But, if I had to do that for every key news provider, it would turn into pretty tiresome.

Eventually, they could be shooting themselves in the foot to some extent. If the web site tends to make it tougher and less easy for me to read an short article, I’ll likely go elsewhere. Arabic TV would assume that I would normally be capable to study the news for cost-free on the BBC’s web-site, which would not be excellent news for the advertising income of the Murdoch on the web empire.

Copycats

Assuming that I basically wanted to study an article on a paid web site so badly that I handed over my credit card information to them, what would cease me ‘reporting’ on what the article stated on my freely readily available weblog? I would visualize it would be pretty really hard for a newspaper group to stop thousands of bloggers disseminating the data freely to their users who would obtain lots of traffic in the course of action.

Recipe for Achievement?

The results or failure of paid news is in the technique made use of to charge and engage with users, assuming that the users worth the content material hugely adequate to deem it worth paying for. The jury is absolutely still out on the whole concept and the probabilities are that a lot of will attempt and fail before a lucrative program is created. Till then, we’ll have to wait and see.