That's stupid! No one charges for online news! Besides, if I want to know about about something, I'll just search it and get the news from any one of their millions of free competitors.
Real journalists, who actually leave the office, cost money. Sending crews to foreign countries and giving them the resources they need to investigate what is going on is not cheap. Unless you are content with getting information purely from government officials. I, for one, don't trust the government that much.
At the moment, most online news operations are subsidized by their offline operations. But traditional sources of revenue (subscription and advertising revenue) is dwindling. This is why some news organizations are charging online -- the online component doesn't actually cover its true cost of production.
As for standalone online news operations, they either leech from traditional sources (ie news organizations with offline revenue) or they rely on link bait to generate traffic to cover their costs through online advertising.
It will be interesting to see how this works. The WSJ and Financial Times have been successful in implementing paywalls, I think, because their readership is somewhat of a niche: wealthier business people. The Times's target market is a little more broad, so if it works well we may see other papers do the same.
psst: WSJ, FT and Forbes paywalls can be circumvented by searching for the headline in google, then clicking on the result for the same page, voila! Wonder if The Times works similarly.
Well that's kind of the thing about modern journalism. Information's free. So then, the jobs will only be as plentiful as advertisements make them to be. As a budding reporter, this scares me. There is no good ending.
Yes, everyone expects stuff free. And then you wonder why "journalism" has sunk to its currently pathetic level.
People need to grow the f**k up and think it through. Musicians can't survive and spend time making music if they can't afford shelter or food. Journalists and other writers have the same basic requirements for survival.
I'm not defending the egregious rip-offs perpetrated by studios and record companies; I'm defending the right of people to get paid for their work.Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
I don't feel sorry for journalists or musicians because most of them are self-important egotistical douchebags. If they can't find a way to adapt to the 21st century, that's their f**king problem, not mine.Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
Yeah, because you know so many of them personally. The only douchebag here is you, who claims to be all-knowing about these professionals and yet fails to explain how one "adapts" to giving away his life's work free.
Your response is typical of today's infantile society, where people's development simply stops at the ME ME ME stage. GIMME GIMME GIMME. WAAAHHHHHH!Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
This argument is based off of 2 different business models. Journalism traiditonally has been supported by subscriptions (in the case of physical newspapers) and advertising, both in print and online. Musicians, afaik, have never been supported by advertising, but by touring and album sales.
"Musicians can't survive and spend time making music if they can't afford shelter or food."
LOL!! There are plenty of musicians and song writers who play gigs on the side and record original music thats being heard all around the world. Many of these people have regular jobs.
The only thing the big labels are concerned about is that their execs will no longer have ridiculous salaries, hookers, car collections and giant houses in which they have coke snortin' parties.
The Times is usually the the first. Not many purchase a "newspaper" anymore. Without distribution-no ads. No ads-no income. No-income loss of jobs. Do I like it-not really, I do enjoy reading The Times online, for free, yet I applaud them for the inntovative marketing solutions. They are just the first of many.Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
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Dear friends, please temporarily stop your footsteps
To our website Walk around A look at
Maybe you'll find happiness in your sight shopping heaven and earth
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Are the prices we meet their needs.
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AF t-shirt long (Market Price: $48 Our Price: $25.00)
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AF1 low (Market Price: $79Our Price: $45.00)
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Then what you waiting for?
Hurry movement of your mouse
Enjoy shopping pleasure,
Additionally, we also free shipping%u3001Only charge a small Insurance.
Thanks to the support! http://2going.com/Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
Look at the trajectory of readership since the beginning of June and extrapolate. A straight line indicates that within a month (i.e now since they haven't released figures since mid June) they'll hit near zero. It may start to level off soon but I'm willing to bet it will level off at a sub 1% level and maybe even 1/10th of that. It may be profitable but I wonder if it will cover the loss of advertisers who won't want to invest in ads for a site with a readership so small it is almost statistical noise.
Murdoch will naturally use this as ammunition against the BBC which is my first port of call for real news.
People still pay for music, movies, video games, porn, and other stuff they could get for free on the internet. If it keeps them from taking a government bailout, I'm all for it. I ain't gonna pay for their s**tty articles though.
Dead trees and biased op-eds are on their way out. At least, the vast majority of them are. Unless the government bails them out (personally I forecast a 100% chance of this happening).
Dead Trees are out, but Op-Eds will live forever...if you think about it, most newspaper stories are just facts written in an entertaining manner. Fun, but hardly a barrier to entry.
Opinions, and interpretation of the facts, are what makes a story worth reading, and/or possibly paying for. The informed opinion, and qualified reputation of the author is what separates a NY Times op-ed piece from a random internet rant on some guys blog...or a comment on digg.
IMHO, there should be *more* OpEd and Analysis stories written, and less AP News syndication (plagiarizing). That would make the news worth paying for, and that's why the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times can get people to pay for online news.
Print newspapers are on life support because of free access to news on the web. If only a handful try charging, they will fail. However, if they ALL start doing at the same time, they might succeed. Unfortunately for them, if they work together in any way to accomplish this, they will have antitrust laws to deal with.
The important point, which people seem to be missing, is that Google News seems no longer to be indexing their stories. I've looked and I can't find one instance of "The Times" turning up as a source.
Now Google still index the FT and other 'subscription' sites, so maybe they've decided to give Murdoch his wish and remove him from the Google News index. Or maybe Murdoch is actually taking the advice and trying to be invisible? Certainly from their robots.txt file there seems to be very little they like the spiders to index.
The Guardian, The BBC, The Telegraph, even The Daily Mail seem to be the main contributors to Google News, and it would be very interesting to see click numbers for the "The Times" and its less backward competitors for this month. I think its going to disappear into oblivion.
Oh, and not even an RSS feed for the new newsprint apeing Times site - who do they think is going to even realise they exist or have stories that might wish to be read? They have essentially dropped off the world.
To the people saying, 'well, iTunes/Netflix/whatever does this,': that's completely different. In general, people have accepted that things like music and movies are pieces of work (or art, if you will) that people have created and deserve to be paid for. Yes, you can get them for free, and many people do, but most of the time, you're not supposed to. Information and news, on the other hand, are things that people have generally accepted should be free, at least in the age of the Internet. Because for every topic you have, there's at least thousands, maybe even millions, of pages for it. And for every million pages, nearly every one of them is from a source that willingly gives you the info for free. So if getting information/news for free is accepted by society, and if the members of society gladly put it out for free, The Times are making a big mistake.
sciguyajJul 2, 2010
That's stupid! No one charges for online news! Besides, if I want to know about about something, I'll just search it and get the news from any one of their millions of free competitors.
tyg10Jul 2, 2010
"No one charges for online news!"
Wasn't there another large newspaper who did this?? I can't remember which one.
philperspectiveJul 2, 2010
The NYT once tried it, and failed. Now they say they'll try again.
wolfboyJul 3, 2010
Technically, the NYT tried it with opinion columns, not its news content. And it failed. Now they say they'll try a paywall for the whole site.
wolfboyJul 3, 2010
The Wall Street Journal has been charging for years.
About 1 million people pay $2 per week to get the online edition.
That translates into more than $100 million per year in income.
And that's in addition to the people who pay to have the printed paper delivered to their door six days per week.
egoidealJul 3, 2010
Real journalists, who actually leave the office, cost money. Sending crews to foreign countries and giving them the resources they need to investigate what is going on is not cheap. Unless you are content with getting information purely from government officials. I, for one, don't trust the government that much.
skinturtleJul 3, 2010
The MSM and news papers are hardly dependable
They may have tops stories first....but people won't run to them first to get the news.
factorof13Jul 3, 2010
You have a point, and it's a good one, but it was much more relevant 30-40 years ago than it is now.
doomesticJul 3, 2010
MSM journalists these days sucks the government officials' c**ks for access. Nothing they write is dependable.
kralJul 3, 2010
WSJ charges, and yet they're a propaganda outlet like Fox News. Maybe those 'free online sources' were actually pretty dependable after all?
yellowsnowconeJul 3, 2010
At the moment, most online news operations are subsidized by their offline operations. But traditional sources of revenue (subscription and advertising revenue) is dwindling. This is why some news organizations are charging online -- the online component doesn't actually cover its true cost of production.
As for standalone online news operations, they either leech from traditional sources (ie news organizations with offline revenue) or they rely on link bait to generate traffic to cover their costs through online advertising.
chiltontippinJul 2, 2010
It will be interesting to see how this works. The WSJ and Financial Times have been successful in implementing paywalls, I think, because their readership is somewhat of a niche: wealthier business people. The Times's target market is a little more broad, so if it works well we may see other papers do the same.
vstg005Jul 2, 2010
psst: WSJ, FT and Forbes paywalls can be circumvented by searching for the headline in google, then clicking on the result for the same page, voila! Wonder if The Times works similarly.
cawpinJul 3, 2010
The difference is the WSJ was NEVER free to access. They've always charged for it. Once something is free, people won't pay for it.
thejetpackerJul 2, 2010
If you're going to charge for something, you need to provide content that people can't get for free from 500 other sources.
drakenkingJul 3, 2010
It works for iTunes
lolmacintoshJul 3, 2010
Well that's kind of the thing about modern journalism. Information's free. So then, the jobs will only be as plentiful as advertisements make them to be. As a budding reporter, this scares me. There is no good ending.
thejetpackerJul 3, 2010
Yeah, as an established editor it worries me too. Time to find a new industry.
krust50Jul 3, 2010
Right, it is off my list as soon as I saw pound fee
mattbdJul 3, 2010
And they're up against the BBC, who are a lot better and more impartial than most of Murdoch's stable, as well as free.
factsahoyJul 2, 2010
Yes, everyone expects stuff free. And then you wonder why "journalism" has sunk to its currently pathetic level.
People need to grow the f**k up and think it through. Musicians can't survive and spend time making music if they can't afford shelter or food. Journalists and other writers have the same basic requirements for survival.
I'm not defending the egregious rip-offs perpetrated by studios and record companies; I'm defending the right of people to get paid for their work.Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
Closed AccountJul 3, 2010
I don't feel sorry for journalists or musicians because most of them are self-important egotistical douchebags. If they can't find a way to adapt to the 21st century, that's their f**king problem, not mine.Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
factsahoyJul 3, 2010
Yeah, because you know so many of them personally. The only douchebag here is you, who claims to be all-knowing about these professionals and yet fails to explain how one "adapts" to giving away his life's work free.
Your response is typical of today's infantile society, where people's development simply stops at the ME ME ME stage. GIMME GIMME GIMME. WAAAHHHHHH!Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
thegreatsamJul 3, 2010
This argument is based off of 2 different business models. Journalism traiditonally has been supported by subscriptions (in the case of physical newspapers) and advertising, both in print and online. Musicians, afaik, have never been supported by advertising, but by touring and album sales.
skinturtleJul 3, 2010
"Musicians can't survive and spend time making music if they can't afford shelter or food."
LOL!! There are plenty of musicians and song writers who play gigs on the side and record original music thats being heard all around the world. Many of these people have regular jobs.
The only thing the big labels are concerned about is that their execs will no longer have ridiculous salaries, hookers, car collections and giant houses in which they have coke snortin' parties.
The music industry will always live on....big labels and their middle men may not. Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
grexeoJul 2, 2010
Good riddance, RIP.
nationalistJul 2, 2010
why is the daily mail on top? and why is readership for the sun increasing?
ninhJul 3, 2010
Well good luck for both of them reading their paid-for news.
ooxmanJul 3, 2010
"Times Now Charging Online Readers"
...and we all read about this for free on Digg.
immatellyouwhatJul 3, 2010
Dugg.... for free.
anothersoldierJul 3, 2010
If I had a nickle for everytime someone dugg me... I'd be in debt.
k1080Jul 3, 2010
The Times is usually the the first. Not many purchase a "newspaper" anymore. Without distribution-no ads. No ads-no income. No-income loss of jobs. Do I like it-not really, I do enjoy reading The Times online, for free, yet I applaud them for the inntovative marketing solutions. They are just the first of many.Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
virinixJul 3, 2010
"If just 5% of the old online audience stayed - that's about a million people - the champagne corks would be popping at Wapping"
FYI, you wont get 0.5% of your old audience paying.
hipmanJul 3, 2010
Wanna bet?.
pinkertinkleJul 3, 2010
Times No Longer has Online Readers
blacksnakemoanJul 3, 2010
At least they're not charging exorbitant prices for lower quality material and then suing you when you go and find higher quality for free.
hipmanJul 3, 2010
Can you at least post your piracy-justification bulls**t in a relevant thread?.
Closed AccountJul 3, 2010
======== http://2going.com/ ========
http://2going.com/
We need your support and trust!!!
Dear friends, please temporarily stop your footsteps
To our website Walk around A look at
Maybe you'll find happiness in your sight shopping heaven and earth
You'll find our price is more suitable for you.
Welcome to our website http://2going.com/
Next we come to talk about a topic:
Why are now prices are very expensive%uFF1F
yes Many people now have to earn more money
to Pushing up prices
But they didn't find customers buy after won't come back
But friends %uFF0CDo you ever found
Our website is more cost-effective price than others
Want to know why?
The answer is:
We are not the point to earn money
We are long-term trade marketing
We are for the benefit of customers%u3001
Why our customers will be so much?
Are the prices we meet their needs.
Such as:
COACH Bag (Market Price:$69 Our Price:$31.00 )
Ed Hardy hoody (Market Price: $89 Our Price: $41.00)
AF t-shirt long (Market Price: $48 Our Price: $25.00)
POLO t-shirt Short huge (Market Price: $48 Our Price: $14.00)
AF1 low (Market Price: $79Our Price: $45.00)
Jordan 11 Special (Market Price: $79 Our Price: $46.00)
Our price is more suitable for you?
If is the word.
Then what you waiting for?
Hurry movement of your mouse
Enjoy shopping pleasure,
Additionally, we also free shipping%u3001Only charge a small Insurance.
Thanks to the support!
http://2going.com/Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
scy1192Jul 3, 2010
In other news, The Times has become the most recent of a series of old media failures.
greatdrokJul 3, 2010
Look at the trajectory of readership since the beginning of June and extrapolate. A straight line indicates that within a month (i.e now since they haven't released figures since mid June) they'll hit near zero. It may start to level off soon but I'm willing to bet it will level off at a sub 1% level and maybe even 1/10th of that. It may be profitable but I wonder if it will cover the loss of advertisers who won't want to invest in ads for a site with a readership so small it is almost statistical noise.
Murdoch will naturally use this as ammunition against the BBC which is my first port of call for real news.
hipmanJul 3, 2010
Funny, I guess a state-sponsored news agency doesn't have to worry about things like readership or profitability.
greatdrokJul 3, 2010
The BBC leads the pack in unbiassed reporting. Every other news source, especially the Murdoch owned media (e.g. Fox) is horribly biassed.
dsmxJul 3, 2010
The bbc isn't unbiased, nothing can. But it's more balanced than most news networks.
thorpeJul 3, 2010
I don't usually like paying for something that I've been getting free for many years.
bracomadarJul 3, 2010
People still pay for music, movies, video games, porn, and other stuff they could get for free on the internet. If it keeps them from taking a government bailout, I'm all for it. I ain't gonna pay for their s**tty articles though.
bbbreakJul 3, 2010
Was anybody else expecting The Onion?
andrewtheartJul 3, 2010
Not really.
nicko68Jul 3, 2010
It could have been, since it wasn't funny.
Closed AccountJul 3, 2010
The Times becomes the biggest newspaper to begin charging its readers to access its online content."
Will soon read "The Times becomes the biggest newspaper to lose all online readership."
spainkidJul 3, 2010
For the Times, they are a-chargin'
omgwtflawlJul 3, 2010
Dead trees and biased op-eds are on their way out. At least, the vast majority of them are. Unless the government bails them out (personally I forecast a 100% chance of this happening).
bionicpimpJul 3, 2010
Dead Trees are out, but Op-Eds will live forever...if you think about it, most newspaper stories are just facts written in an entertaining manner. Fun, but hardly a barrier to entry.
Opinions, and interpretation of the facts, are what makes a story worth reading, and/or possibly paying for. The informed opinion, and qualified reputation of the author is what separates a NY Times op-ed piece from a random internet rant on some guys blog...or a comment on digg.
IMHO, there should be *more* OpEd and Analysis stories written, and less AP News syndication (plagiarizing). That would make the news worth paying for, and that's why the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times can get people to pay for online news.
itwasonlyajokeJul 3, 2010
I guess ads weren't enough?
lormendiJul 3, 2010
Good luck with that.
Closed AccountJul 3, 2010
Print newspapers are on life support because of free access to news on the web. If only a handful try charging, they will fail. However, if they ALL start doing at the same time, they might succeed. Unfortunately for them, if they work together in any way to accomplish this, they will have antitrust laws to deal with.
factorof13Jul 3, 2010
If all of the major news sites go to a pay model, where will that leaves sites like Digg?
digghasnoethicsJul 3, 2010
The important point, which people seem to be missing, is that Google News seems no longer to be indexing their stories. I've looked and I can't find one instance of "The Times" turning up as a source.
Now Google still index the FT and other 'subscription' sites, so maybe they've decided to give Murdoch his wish and remove him from the Google News index. Or maybe Murdoch is actually taking the advice and trying to be invisible? Certainly from their robots.txt file there seems to be very little they like the spiders to index.
The Guardian, The BBC, The Telegraph, even The Daily Mail seem to be the main contributors to Google News, and it would be very interesting to see click numbers for the "The Times" and its less backward competitors for this month. I think its going to disappear into oblivion.
Oh, and not even an RSS feed for the new newsprint apeing Times site - who do they think is going to even realise they exist or have stories that might wish to be read? They have essentially dropped off the world.
neutron7Jul 3, 2010
welcome to obscurity "times"
fullbackJul 3, 2010
Dearly beloved, we gather here today to mourn the passing of...
crystalagehaJul 3, 2010
To the people saying, 'well, iTunes/Netflix/whatever does this,': that's completely different. In general, people have accepted that things like music and movies are pieces of work (or art, if you will) that people have created and deserve to be paid for. Yes, you can get them for free, and many people do, but most of the time, you're not supposed to. Information and news, on the other hand, are things that people have generally accepted should be free, at least in the age of the Internet. Because for every topic you have, there's at least thousands, maybe even millions, of pages for it. And for every million pages, nearly every one of them is from a source that willingly gives you the info for free. So if getting information/news for free is accepted by society, and if the members of society gladly put it out for free, The Times are making a big mistake.
syst1kJul 3, 2010
The Times They Are a-Changin'
hairypoterJul 3, 2010
RIP
tripplediggerJul 3, 2010
I will continue reading from the BBC news site.
bull3tJul 3, 2010
I don't get it. Who thought this would be a clever idea? Surely they won't actually benefit from it?
darkphenoxJul 3, 2010
You get f**k all from advisement anymore, they will probably come out ahead if they get 1% of the people they have now to pay.
leepiiJul 3, 2010
Why would I pay someone for propaganda?
inactiveuserJul 3, 2010
The what? Who?
marcopolo99Jul 9, 2010
After years of reading The Times I have returned to the Telegraph fold.
Cherio, Murdockski! I suspect that this experiment will be over inside 6 months.