United Liberty
So Crazy it Just Might Work
Wed, 11/11/2009 - 2:40pm | posted by Chris Moody
Once again, media mogul Rupert Murdoch is bucking the system. Sky News reports that he may be taking all paid content from his papers off of Google.
News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch has suggested the company’s online newspaper pages will be invisible to Google users when it launches its new paid content strategy.
He claimed that readers who randomly reach a page via an internet search hold little value to advertisers.
This defies all conventional wisdom about the future of news and journalism. Information wants to be free, and Murdoch is about the only guy in town holding strong, and threatening to go even further. More on this from Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolf.
I hope you don’t mean to suggest that a company spending the kind of money Rupert Murdoch does on building a world-class news organization should give away their work because “Information wants to be free”.
There has to be a business model in place that improves shareholder value or there is no reason to be in business. Free-riders aren’t customers.
Very little information I see on the internet can be considered free. It’s usually accompanied by a myriad of ads that consume my bandwidth, assault my retina (and sometimes auditory nerves) and possible have a subconscious effect on my purchasing decisions. I’d hardly call this exchange abusive on the consumer’s part.
They will price themselves out of the market. If everything on the internet goes to a $5/month plan (which seems cheap), it will quickly become unaffordable. Fox charges $5/month for premium podcasts that they give away free of charge on the radio in exchange for you listening to ads. Perhaps ad revenue isn’t what it once was, but neither is the “big media“‘s role as sole provider of quality information.
All IMHO anyway!
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Don’t surf without it.
“In this free nation we do not choose to be ruled, we elect to be governed.”
— Barry Goldwater
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