Yup, the idea of ad-supported content is one that is now dead to News Corp head Rupert Murdoch. News Corp seems to have suffered some losses of around $3.4 billion or so this past year, and with it Mr. Murdoch is now convinced that the way to make money is to charge for access to online content. It almost seems naive, really. The man firmly believes that people are willing to pay for his content.
There are a few sites on this list with dedicated followings. In addition to The Wall Street Journal, which has been one of the few major news sights to see success in making customers pay for full access, News Corp runs Dow Jones, Marketwatch, and the IGN network of sites, the last of which covers two major video game websites and the film website Rotten Tomatoes. The first two of these sites are quality, and IGN.com alone gets some major traffic, around 6.5 million hits a month. But that’s not going to be enough to get people to fork over their cash to read the sites’ content.
Why, you ask? Because thanks to the internet, you can get more or less the same content from other sites which won’t nickle and dime you. Dow Jones and Marketwatch frequently have interesting content and even sometimes are the first online news outlets to break major stories. But here’s what will happen – some larger sites will pay for access to their content, will pick up their stories, and then pass along the info in a content-added package, only the other sites won’t be charging users for access.
Even with IGN’s success, the internet is a fickle place that does not like to pay for things out of pocket. While many a gamer reads the site for news and walkthroughs, all a move to charge for content will serve to do is to drive traffic to competitors like Gamefaqs and Gamespy.
Of course, w don’t know precisely which sites Mr. Murdoch plans to make for pay only. If he’s smart (and you usually don’t get that rich by being purely an imbecile), he’ll realize that there’s no future in charging for access to IGN, even though I’m fairly certain that would be the only exception amongst his news sites. We also don’t know the details of the implementation yet, which could make all the difference in the world. If someone has to pay $4 a month for access to all of News Corp’s online holdings, then I can see customer retention, but if Mr. Murdoch tries to charge for access per site, he’s a fool.
(Info via The Guardian)
