Should we pay for digital media? It’s the hottest topic occupying the minds of every media professional today. And some are very vocal about it.
News Corp owner and possibly the most influential man in media for the last 30 years, Rupert Murdoch has released the latest salvo in a campaign to convert non-paying browsers of his brands’ websites into revenue streams.
The trouble is, everyone expects content to be free. It’s not just news content, but TV and music too. Murdoch is haranguing not only free-loading web viewers, but also other web operations that reproduce content created by his brands.
Speaking at the World Media Summit in Beijing, Murdoch said: “The aggregators and the plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid-for content, it will be the content creators… who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph.”
It’s no surprise he should take this stance — his strategy to set his companies’ content behind a paywall will only work if News Corp can control access to the content it creates. And it’s interesting he made the statement in China, which culturally has a very different idea about intellectual property.
It’s not just Murdoch titles in the UK that are rethinking their revenues strategies. Next Monday, the London Evening Standard is due to start distributing for free, because the free-sheet competition has impacted newsstand sales and the increased circulation will make it attractive to advertisers.
At the same time, The London Paper — a Murdoch-owned free title given out to commuters on their way back home from work — has been forced to close.
There’s not much disagreement among media companies about not being able to go on providing content for free much longer, but there’s very little unity on how they intend to go about converting browsers to buyers.
On the one hand, you have something like BBC’s iPlayer, which has an obligation to be free, to Spotify which is operating on a freemium model, to what Murdoch is proposing — a tightly controlled distribution model which is totally paid for.
Saying isn’t doing though, and News International, the Murdoch business that operates The Times, Sunday Times, News of the World and Sun, has not revealed exactly how it expects people to pay for content, or when it intends to throw this paywall up.
As for stamping out aggregating and plagiarism (technically known in the trade as ripping off other people’s stuff), that’s a task akin to knitting fog. It’s difficult to see how News Corp, or any other media organisation is going to police the whole internet and enforce IP rights across global borders to make sure no one copies content they haven’t paid to produce.
It’s a brave man who underestimates Murdoch though. He’s already achieved some pretty ambitious things in the past. I’m sure there were quite a few print shop-stewards on The Times in the 1980s who thought: “Change our working conditions and move us away from Fleet Street? Who does this Murdoch guy think he is? He won’t last long.”
(Pic: World Economic Forum cc2.0)
