TheBoySaunders.com

So Rupert Murdoch has decided to make good on his oft-repeated pledge to charge for access to his news websites, which include The Times, The Sun and The News of the World, from next Summer. It won’t work.

People won’t pay for content they can get just as easily from other sources. Sure, The Times website is pretty good. The Guardian and The Independent are just as good though and, frankly, they don’t have the constant self-promotion of other News International companies to contend with. And even if these other sites follow the Murdoch lead and start to charge for content? It’s the Internet, free alternatives will spring up within days.

It’s ironic that this news came out on the same day that ITV sold Friends Reunited at an impressive £145million loss: that website was effectively dead the second it attempted to switch to a pay model. Facebook came out of nowhere and blew away the competition… but the second it tries to make you pay, another free competitor will do exactly the same thing.

The internet is still a new phenomenon, and no-one can work out how to make money from it. Youtube is a prime example: Google paid $1.65 billion to acquire it, and forks out untold amounts of cash to pay for all the hosting (how many megabytes of data is uploaded every minute? All that storage space doesn’t come cheap. Hell, The Boy Saunders Sings is still sitting there, untouched, unloved…). Yet how do they make their money back? Advertising? Has anyone reading this ever clicked on a Youtube advertisment, rather than closing it as soon as the ugly pop-up appears?

So, yeah. In summary… paying for online content is bad, mmmkay. The Current Economic Climate™ will not allow it. And, by the time things get better, I will be World President (or ‘Grand Terran Vizier’, I haven’t decided which yet) and then I will not allow it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 11:22 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.