The great paywalls of News Corp.
After a decade of attempts to save the newspaper industry the final hail mary seems to be the online paywall. The crown for bloviating on the subject must be laid upon the pate of Emperor Rupert Murdoch who began his, "Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use” death march right after the $203-million loss at News Corp in the 4th quarter of 2009. The Times and The Sunday Times of London are the first News Corp victims to test the theory that people are willing to pay for news they can get other places for free AND be subjugated to the annoyance of advertising. Apparently, Murdoch decided to cull the weakest of his herd first as the annual pre-tax losses at these two papers grew to £87.7m as of June 2009, from £50.2m in the previous 12 months. Both papers went into full Kim Jong-il style security mode on July 2, 2010. As of this post (seven days later) the effect of the paywall on site traffic isn't known but a clear sign of the coming disaster can be seen in what happened exactly one month earlier.
On June 2, 2010 - in an attempt to soften the beachhead for the impending paywall - the Times began asking for registration to access the "free" content on the site. According to Experian Hitwise the traffic began to immediately drop, and the losses accelerated for the next three weeks. The net result was the loss of over half of the Times readers before the actual paywall took effect. What happened to the remaining traffic on July 2? My hypothesis is that it was the same jaw-dropping, burn out your retinas, super spectacular failure that the Long Island Daily, Newsday experienced when it went behind a paywall in October 2009. Using the results of the Harris Interactive poll regarding web users willingness to pay for online news the Times should now have lost 95% of their readers.
In the end, the failure of paywalls is a distraction. It's just another experimental drug for a patient that died years ago. The reality is that all mass media/mass marketing business models - from magazines to broadcast TV - are no longer viable, and newspapers are just the first to go. Maybe it's time to stop trying to animate the dead. Maybe it's time to realize that a small group of "professionals" deciding what to filter, create, and disseminate to a massive (and mostly passive) audience was never an ideal system except for the media barons that amassed vast power and wealth from it. Society doesn't need newspapers, it just needs journalism and the same forces that have destroyed newspapers are expanding opportunities for journalists (especially the citizen variety) while democratizing the spread of information and knowledge. That the "people formerly known as the audience" are now creating, and sharing information is fantastic, but the coolest part is that we are also connecting and acting on this knowledge in ways never before possible.
I propose that News Corp redirect the funds being used to build paywalls and sponsor a global wake for the newspaper industry. An epic party with live bands, free yacht rides, and a massive firework display celebrating a much brighter post-newspaper future.
