What matters to me mightn’t matter to you.

Sincerely

Free Press

I wasn’t suggesting you were pro charging, I was just interested in your position on the matter.

Your answer is EXACTLY why no-one will ever pay for newspapers online.

Many thanks

Keep the debates going

Free Press

on top of this they need to place a value on the content/product

with that in mind, what can the local news providers really charge for?

my thoughts with newpapers is the cover charge you pay isn’t for the content – it’s for the time spent to curate/piece together the most valid or entertaining news/content/pictures. same with pay tv.

with online, right now, there doesn’t seem to be much curation … there’s just a sh*tload of stories/AAP feeds etc. Surely there must be a value in creating a product/publication which filters out all the irrelevant and says ‘this is what matters’

Even in the context of a subscription/paid model, volume or reach has a role to play, and for larger publishers like News, that role is more substantial than for a more specialist publisher like Mumbrella. Exhibit A: football coverage on BSkyB

The thing is whenever the Govt announces a new toll road the first thing the media always ask is how much is it going to cost?

This is the big question that seems to have gone unanswered in this ongoing debate. No doubt it will be as confusing as pay TV.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the Sunday Times starts charging for its online news next month…

Free Press – The views we report above are those of the panel, rather than mine.

But to answer your question, my personal view in Mumbrella’s case is that our model is about building a large specialist audience and then paying the bills by helping relevant advertisers reach it. For the core product, that relies on making it freely available. But people may be willing to pay for certain services around it. For instance, this morning more than 100 people paid $95 each to sit in a room and heard four interesting people talk about the industry.

Terry T, It’s about convenience, I’d argue. Sure, I could go online and find that news bulletin for free somewhere. But if I can look at it now, on my mobile, on the bus on the way home, then that might be worth 50c.

Also, aren’t you making a bit of an assumption that the ’7-foot pay wall’ will be around everything? I’m not sure I’ve heard News Ltd arguing that, and certainly not recently.

Cheers,

Tim – Mumbrella

exclusive premium content will – people will pay for stories that you just cant get anywhere else – so then it become a race for the exclsuive storys to deive the paid readers

bring it on – cant wait too see the outcome

Google indexes content. I know that say news.com.au and smh.com.au etc are mainly destination sites, however tehse sites will still attract thousands upon thousands of visitors from search engines (please correct me if I am wrong here?)

- What happens when I am researching or googling some names or events and I click through to news.com.au and it says “please enter your user id and password”? I know what I will do: I will click ‘back’ and find the content I am after on a free site… SEO will dip to these portals because if you click back Google will think that the site is not relevant to that search result…

A smaller part of the pie, however another point against the paid content side perhaps..?

Answer – put it behind a paywall.

That not a person has mentioned the story of Fairfax’s afr.com paywall experiment in this discussion indicates how successful the vanishing act has been.

Further, the idea that “someone has to have the courage” creates a bit of chuckling over at Fairfax. By all means, News, go right ahead and build that 7-foot wall, with barbed wire, and guard dogs. Go right ahead News and stand by the mantra that content investment must be underwritten by a combination of ad and subscription dollars. Fairfax is salivating at the idea of seeing their monthly UAs jump 300% when News flicks the “PAY” switch. Christ, where’s the objectivity and honesty in all these so-called ‘leadership’ panel discussions.

The writer – an adman himself – believes that the yin and yang of mass marketing and mass media have decoupled – and this has consequences as potentially devastating for the marketing industry as for the media industry.

If the papers are motivated enough (like the porn companies were to introduce credit card transctions, and video over the internet) to introduce a micro payment service on the internet, then I would ‘pay by the story’.

Mobiles are a different kettle of fish and that is getting updates where and when you want them and not choice, very walled garden already.

Pay TV is about choice, news papers are about advertising.

the genie is out of the bottle, and news content just is not worth that much anymore.

anyway I can’t wait to see who tries first, really hope its Murdoch, maybe he should also charge for Myspace spare us all it’s slow death.