Thursday, January 10, 2008

Murdoch Shackles Media

On Mashable.com today, blogger Paul Glazowski discusses Murdoch's business strategy and how Murdoch attempts to revamp the Wall Street Journal in the coming months.

I say pony up, Murdoch. Quit stalling. Just give us the stories, and stop asking for our credit card info when registering accounts. Yes, we know, you like making the most money you can. But as we all know, news on the Net is now news without fees. Give in, dude. Now. Or at least soon. There’s simply no point in holding out any longer.


Well, the internet is definitely taking over the media and a lot of paper-based models, like the Wall Street Journal, are going to have to ways to cope. Certainly, a lot of odd-ball pricing models are going to make their way out especially if media companies want to try to avoid the advertising revenue stream as their main pricing strategy.



1 comment:

Dany said...

When Murdoch took over WSJ, he said that a free edition could draw as much as 10 million to 15 million readers, (about 10 times its current 1 million subscribers), and finance it by ad revenue.

It would have been remarkable to turn the current business model of paid subscribers into a ad-revenue based model, but I was a bit skeptical to hear that.

Granted, the readership might increase, but the type of audience would be quite different. A free edition might not draw the type of people that advertisers currently target and dilute the current brand name of the WSJ.

If the WSJ becomes free, the journal would also lose a substantial revenue stream from its current online and print subscriptions. Current subscribers might not be interested in paying for a print subscription for what they can get for free online. With current tools such as the Amazon Kindle and such, the current print subscription will offer less of a convenience of "take and read where you want".

Yet, I would enjoy reading a free edition, and I would probably end up reading more of the WSJ and less of the NYT if it were completely free.