Rupert Murdoch’s paywall goes up around his papers, the
Times and
Sunday Times in London, this June. His plan is much more straightforward and draconian than almost anyone suspected. It is designed to keep you from reading his papers online and, if you want to read his papers, to make you buy a subscription.
His plan is not to create an online business or, even, to realize significant additional revenues from online readership. The plan is to get you to read newspapers—as in papers.
Which, given everything, is pretty audacious or confounding or senile (Jeff Jarvis refers to it as Murdoch’s “pathetic paywall”).
The most transformative event in the history of modern news is the movement of consumers from offline news sources—newspapers and television—to online sources. The former continues to quickly decline, the latter to dramatically grow.
Rupert’s pay model is meant to frustrate this new behavior. It’s corrective: the consumer is wrong. Indeed, technology itself is misguided. You shouldn’t be searching on your computer. You should be folding and reading on the Tube.
Anyway, the plan works like this: you can get online access to the
Times and
Sunday Times for about a $1.50 a day or $3.00 a week (£1 a day or £2 a week). In Rupert’s mind this is perhaps not unreasonable because it mirrors the cost of an actual paper. But in an online world, consumers read more than one “paper.” They tend to look, on average, at four or five news sites. The most active news consumers look at significantly more. If most news sites charge, which seems to be Rupert’s ultimate hope, the prime news consumer could be looking at a bill of a thousand bucks a year.
Even to Rupert, that can’t make sense. Or, it does make sense: it would drastically curtail the online news business (it wouldn’t really because there are lots of pure Internet news businesses that have no interest in charging—like Newser—but Rupert can’t really comprehend those businesses).
But the other part of his new program is that you’ll get the online side for free if you merely subscribe to the paper product. Online is an add-on, in other words, a form of subscription promotion—a reader service.
You encourage present subscribers, more and more tempted by online access and efficiency, to renew. You bring back a small portion of those who, in the recent years of online transformation, have deserted you. And you give the finger to those people who you’ll never make a buck on (including that ever-growing international audience who UK advertisers aren’t interested in). Anyway, the point is to discourage online readership and, if you really want the
Times, turn you back to the paper product.
This all makes sense in a through-the-looking-glass sort of way. Or, it makes sense if you see your business as finite. That is, to maximize profits in the short term.
It is not an entirely unstrategic plan if you are 79.
Rupert’s great pleasure is reading his newspapers everyday. He would not know where to find them or how to read them if they were online. (His face distorts when people talk to him using online jargon.) He needs, for a few years more, to protect what he understand and loves. Swiftly, and with a Murdochian lack of sentiment, he's cutting off his online business to spite his face.
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com. You can also follow him on Twitter: @MichaelWolffNYC.
