Two sites I’ve paid for, Metafilter and Flickr, provide useful examples.

Metafilter presents stories about news, sometimes timely, sometimes not, but always interesting, and the follow-on discussion is the best part. What do you have to pay for? Not to read, but to participate and contribute. To count such interesting people among your peers. It’s totally worth it, no paywall needed.

Flickr is just a textbook example of the freemium model. Some sites would do well with this, too. They could provide some material for free, and some resources for pay. Hasn’t NPG been doing this for years?

And creating a quality product that people are willing to pay for is the key to survival in the digital age. Newspapers have dug their own grave by lowering quality and relying on wire reports so much so that they’re all pretty much interchangeable. Put one behind a paywall and it’s easily replaced with the next one. Scholarly journals at least have the advantage of having unique irreplaceable content.

Second point here is that I do not understand the noise over Google First Click update – Google previously said that for them to index paywall content, you 1) had to let them in and 2) had to let each landing page page be viewed by a user coming from Google. Their change is minor in that they have said that you can limit the number of inbound visits from one person in one day if you wish. I think you could have done that anyway by the way. They’ve just been explicit about it. I think they are actually trying to say “Um, all that inbound traffic we’ve been sending you – perhaps you want to put a call to action up on your site when they arrive?”. Some of us Scholarly publisher have been doing that for a while and it give useful data.

Especially for Scholarly Kitchen Readers I went to The Times (London), the Sun and the news of the World websites to look for subscription options… I did find an option for the Times (eventually – the lack of emphasis was notable) but couldn’t find any options for the the other two. And (shudder) I did look. So much for that then. If Murdoch cannot be serious about trying to convert web visitors into print subscribers (he doesn’t actually seem to offer a web subcription to the UK papers from what I can see) then his argument (such as it is holds no water whatesoever).

The problem with newspapers is simply stated and has been pointed out repeatedly by smart people for a while (and David, you’ve quoted the point) – If you don’t provide unique valuable content then you don’t have a monopoly and economics dictates what happens to commodities… The sad truth is this, most content in a newspaper is of zero value. This is why you find them scattered on the floor of the tube in London. The message for publishers of scholarly content is this. Fight the perception that most Scholarly content is of zero value. You want to see innovation in newspapers? go look at the Guardians work with datasharing of their content. Monetizing the very thing that Murdoch is complaining about.

Final thing: I watched the video of his interview (all 40mins). The comments you quoted about him being out of touch, are perceptive. It’s an uncomfortable video to watch. Especially when he struggles to bring any organisation to his argument, or cannot recall the name of “that video site” (Youtube- where Murdoch owned organisations post video interviews of their boss).

I do agree that the market is overloaded with news sources (the 24 hour news cycle has massively damaged quality) and we’re likely to see a sharp reduction in the number of outlets, and in the cost of production from those outlets. Either they find a way to do their job cheaper, or most of them disappear and the few left use the scarcity to drive a subscription-only model.

And I’m with you, enough threats, let’s see some action, let’s see if anyone can put a dent in Google’s so far invincible armor. It has to happen sooner or later….

There’s way more journalism being done than the market can support at the current profit levels. Something has to happen, and if Fox wants to give up their marketshare, it would make a lot of people very happy. They’re not going to all disappear, so I wouldn’t worry too much about Google.

They’ve been threatening this for almost a year now. Do it already!

On the subject of news, by the way, Cuban has an article claiming that Google has already lost that battle–Twitter and Facebook are where people go for breaking news these days, not the glacially-paced Google.