Content: To Pay or Not to Pay?
Many SEO’s believe that content is king. Quality content will always do well online, people will link to it, disseminate it for you, often it can take on a binary life of its own and raise your brand’s awareness with little more effort expended by the creator. And we’ll happily produce it for free as long as it garners us some positive link equity and other such digital marketing perks.
However for newspapers the game is a bit different. For years now the major broadsheets and tabloids have been giving away their content for free. Why spend £1.20 on the paper when you can surf the website without having to pay? This is the quandary I find myself in most days. I’ve compromised by reading articles on the website in the week and purchasing the weekend editions Saturday and Sunday, so I don’t feel like a fully fledged, ice cold cheapskate.
When Rupert Murdoch announced his plan to start putting up pay walls for the online content of his publications such as the Times, the Sun and The Wall Street Journal people were aghast. ‘How dare he’ people were saying and ‘Nobody will pay for it’, however why not? Circulation numbers are declining and the print industry is on its last legs as journalists are losing work left, right and centre. Quality content is worth paying for, and although I don’t want to fill Mr Murdoch’s pocket I do think that newspaper websites need more of a business model than just relying on advertising revenue. Whether this can be achieved with pay walls or a more innovative strategy, I don’t know.
The most recent revelation is that good old Rupe is threatening to delete any News Corp content out of Google’s index so no articles will show in the search results, as an attempt to encourage people to pay. His bitterness towards Google demonstrates the extent of his disillusionment. Fighting against the search engine will not save his publications or make him any more money; rather he should be working with Google. If anyone can figure out how to implement a more secure business model for newspapers and their online content, then Google’s the company to do it.
Buzz Machine blogger and Guardian columnist Jeff Jarvis has been Tweeting like mad about this issue today, saying “Sad, in a way. Murdoch used to compete. Now he whines.” “RT @chipmason: Please Rupert, block Google, charge $. Sooner u do it, sooner u fail, and let real innovation begin. http://bit.ly/me5XQ”
The Guardian is not going to start charging for its online content, however with the recent near death of the Observer how do they propose to survive the world wide web and it’s lack of monetary rewards.
So Murdoch and his pay walls don’t have many fans, this is to be expected. But journalists need to make a wage and their quality content is certainly worth paying for, but how do they do it? Let us know your suggestions in the comments section.
January 7th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
A possible solution to the arrest the decline of print media – is for all publishers to come together and initiate a single source which would be paid for like the BBC licence fee. People would access the site and read the publication of choice. Restrictions on copying could be applied. From the fee, publishers would police, monitor and hound transgressors with copyright action. Fees could be distributed to publishing particpants according to usage (verified).