They've had enough. Enough of all you freeloaders stopping by their sites and not paying. Enough of you ignoring the ads they've served up for you. And enough of you reading and sharing their stuff elsewhere.
'They' is traditional newspaper and media publishers who are now online. And their point of view can best be summed up by (New Zealand) National Business Review boss Barry Colman who told subscribers he was drawing a line under "the crazy model adopted by newspapers in most parts of the free world in which they pay the enormous costs of running professional newsrooms only to give away their content away free."
As a result, the age of free, the ability to read almost anything, anywhere online and not have to cough up for it, is something they now want to bring to a close. And there's a concerted effort going on from some of the biggest guns in the industry, to try and make this happen. Consider that:
1 - Here in the UK, the Newspaper Licensing Authority, which represents Britain's national newspaper groups, wants to dole out licenses before you can share links.
The idea is that if you professionally monitor the websites of newspapers (which most agencies and in house marketing departments do), you will need an annual license from the NLA for the simple act of forwarding a URL of a newspaper website by email....which obviously brings traffic back to said site.
While focusing on the relatively soft target of people like myself who need to monitor the media as part of their jobs, the NLA doesn't actually have the cojones to go after Google News, under the rationale that Google doesn't make money from it (news to Google I'm sure). But the Associated Press in the US does.
2 - Last year the Associated Press got in hot water when it announced it was charging bloggers for using as little as five words of its content in posts. The AP kind of backed down, but now this proposal rears its head again in a different form. However it's not small time bloggers that are in the AP's sights but global search engines like Google, (Microsoft) Bing and Yahoo!.
According to the New York Times, AP President Tom Curley said "if someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred million businesses out of headlines and we're going to do that." And that I think is the crux of it. It's not so much copyright as a case of, "we want some of what they're getting!"
Though the AP gets money for its content to appear on Google News and the Huffington Post, it doesn't get anything from general search results. This is what it wants to change via - just like Britain's NLA - a system where it doles out licenses before you can link back.
A system that sounds to me much like 18th century trade protectionism. Buy a license to import or export goods - or in this case, buy a license before you can send links around.
"The current days of the Internet will soon be over"
3 - And then we have the giant of the English speaking media world Rupert Murdoch planning to charge for his portfolio of newspapers in the US, the UK and Australia with a News International team in Sydney looking into ways that this might work. Murdoch has put so much behind this that Wired in its latest issue wondered: "Can Rupert Murdoch save online news?"
According to Murdoch, "We will control the prices for our content and we will control the relationship with our customers...the current days of the internet will soon be over." So that's that then.
Well maybe not. I wonder whether ultimately the attempts of the old guard are ultimately doomed for three reasons:
1 - For this to work everyone really has to be aligned. So ALL major newspaper groups need to be in step and start charging. Otherwise, news is news and consumers will carry on going to where its free.
The Daily Telegraph in the UK for one has already decided that free is ultimately more lucrative as it allows it to sell loads of other stuff onto its user base. And what the New York Times has in mind doesn't really sound like charging for content either.
The biggest gap in the charging wall however will come from online TV news services like BBC and CNN online. With their websites being much like online newspapers with added video anyway, they stand to benefit from consumers who simply just want 'the news' (as opposed to the news from The Times etc).
2 - As the Wired piece admits, it's all very well to charge for the Wall Street Journal, but looking at other titles in Murdoch's stable how about the tabloid The Sun (or the New York Post in the US)? Wil a subscription model really work there?
3 - The Web is the hotbed of invention. Perhaps charging will provide an opportunity for other services to emerge, Huffington Post style, to carry on providing free content. And really there often is a work around to a lot of these ideas. For example, I mentioned the newspaper licensing agency here in the UK. The NLA intends to charge for sending links by email but not via Twitter....well fine, guess we'll Twitter direct message the links, which get forwarded to, um, email.
Ultimately what publishers are trying to do is to turn back the tide of history and how often does that work? I don't think it can, especially since free is now the norm, encouraged by none other than the likes of Rupert Murdoch in the first place. Interesting times in watching publishers trying to make this stick over the coming year though.
- Crouching Newspaper, Soaring Blog- The Future Of Journalism? (stuckinfijimud.blogspot.com)
- Mail Online takes top spot with 29.3m unique users (guardian.co.uk)
- All the news that's free to print (innovationtoronto.com)
- Charles Warner: The Economist Eats the WSJ's Lunch (huffingtonpost.com)
- Alternatives to charging for content from the New York Times and Daily Telegraph (thisisherd.com)
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