The Future of Pay Walls
With Rupert Murdoch’s mention yesterday of making consumers pay for all content, no matter the relative quality, e.g., WSJ, NY Post, Telegraph, Fox News, etc. has again paved the way for a heap of dicussion about “pay walls.” With the WSJ’s 1 million users bringing in $65 million per year, and the FT free-to-pay model working, Murdoch is trying to lead by supply, and see if demand and the rest of the competition accept the anti-free model. While this may momentarily resuscitate some of the publishing models, while recreating the cable model where free tv became paid, will it also curtail more voices or media navigators (read: niche blogs and news aggregators).
For example, what happens to the Huffington Post, Drudge Report, Newser, AllTop and other thousands of sites that rely on some form of online reference story or link to create virtual newspapers or magazines?
With so much information and news, as well as means to virally or socially share that news (via Twitter, Facebook, etc.), will these pay walls reduce the amount of long form news items? As publishing editors start to look at views (or reads), will the specialty stories lose their placement?
Similar to the independent film business, if independent voices are diminished, this will create a negative effect on niche and genre/media-navigated sites. They won’t be able to stretch to fill the void left by the voices lost.
Will there be a great “roll-up” of blogs/news aggregators as Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington has suggested is a better way to meet traditional publishing head on, or does a roll-up also freeze out the individual voices?
Nikki Finke guides her entertainment trade blog on an insider, and yes, oftentimes venomous pitch – will sites have to go to editorial extremes to stand-out from the accepted pay walls?
It’s the transition of these web/underground news sites to becoming more mainstream that evolves the system. If Arianna Huffington is the Murdoch of the web, how does she maintain course, if she can’t scale her sources?
Mainstream media is innovated on the backs of those specialty voices or editorial that has crossed over successfuly.
One commenter (“the sun king”) on SAI/Business Insider shared the delicate balance of where media goes, as it directly affects his or her own content.
i agree that there will be lots of specialised sites like BI [Business Insider], but their problem is that they paraphrase and link to mainstream stories like the WSJ. it is not inconceivable that in a couple of years time WSJ, FT, NYT, AP, Reuters and all the primary news sources, ie those with news rooms that break news, will be totally behind firewalls. I am trying to license some content from a wire service for an online site i do, but they just changed their policy and wont license me content if i myself do not wall off and password protect my site. They want to charge me based on the number of subscribers i have. so now my options for getting real live news onto my site are diminishing. AP still offers some web content to free sites like mine, but i am hearing grumbles from them this too may stop. then where will the huffington posts ad BI’s of this world be – no stories to paraphrase or link to? I mean seriously for business and world news journalism there are only 4 major wire services and 3 major news organisations in the world that are the primary source of most of the news we get. i think its only a matter of time until they erect the wall.
The comment above suggests that licensing linkouts might even force blogs to pay wall themselves – or aggregate themselves – as third-party sites to the bigger presses. Is this subjugation necessary, one might ask?
What did we ever do without allegedly “free” news? Without paying an ISP who usually does not originate news, I would not have access to free news on the internet. I haven’t had access to “free” TV in over 20 years. It all rides into my house on an expensive cable. I am one of the dwindling few who has a newspaper subscription. I was about to say that the only news I get for free is on radio, but I actually pay subscription fees to help support NPR too. What is available on free stations is all too often opinion masquerading as news or headlines so truncated as to provide no real information at all. It’s costly to maintain the infrastructure of news bureaus and to support investigative journalism worldwide. It is a cost free societies bear because the alternative is so reprehensible.
The only people complaining loudly about the disappearance of allegedly ‘free’ news are the folks whose parasitic business models depend wholly on re-purposing other peoples’ expensive intellectual property for free. Let them generate their own content and see if they can survive in the marketplace of ideas.