Ever since News Corp’s founder Rupert Murdoch earlier this month mentioned that he considered removing its sites from Google, many have commented on its possible adverse effects. The latest turn of events is the discussion of an exclusive deal with Microsoft which would give their struggling search engine Bing an edge in the market share battle while boosting newspaper revenue through a compensation model. I wonder how important this debate really is, and whether a decision in either direction will actually change anything.
If we take a step back and look outside of these search engine related questions – the big question remain – are people willing to pay for news online?
As people increasingly find breaking news and stories via social media such as micro blogs, regular blogs or aggregated or referenced on thousands of other sites, there’s still the issue of who is willing to actually pay for the information in digital format. Except for business critical information such as the Wall Street Journal, it’s proven very difficult to make up for lost advertising revenue by getting people to subscribe to online news sources. In a previous article I mentioned various other innovative ways that are currently being tested to monetize newspapers.
But there is some spark of hope – the recent rapid uptake of ebooks and dedicated readers indicates that it’s perhaps not the news in themselves that people are reluctant to pay for, but rather the clunky combination of reading news on a computer (too big) or phone (too small), the distribution channel (hi, Google Fastflip), and hassle of existing payment systems?
According to an article on the Independent, iLounge publisher Jeremy Horwitz suggests that Apple could be the one ending up saving the newspapers.
With the iPhone operating system’s in-application micro payment system, Apple have created a very easy-to-use and already mass-market solution for buying byte-sized content on the go. And with an Apple tablet rumored to be around the corner, this could be the perfect combination of medium, distribution and payment to gain momentum for online newspaper subscriptions.
Is iTunes and Apple Tablet the next newspaper distribution channel?
Related posts:
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
On the mark Magnus. Read a very interesting article in The Economist “The World in 2010″ Edition on how e-readers can save newspapers. I don’t even think we’ll need an Apple tablet – not pocket friendly. Apps like Stanza are changing the way we consume content – which is a very good thing.
Thanks Matt, I need to have a look at that Stanza app.
I think the UI will be really important in this transition, and perhaps the Microsoft Courier (http://bit.ly/kl8gg) will be the answer.
But I think the eBook uptake is mostly (fre)ebooks at the moment (see http://www.gutenberg.org/), and I can’t see how information such as news will ever be ‘paid’ for. BUT it will be nice to see Murdoch fail again.
Let the information be free!
Adam, interesting point about the freebook. I’ve noticed though that ebooks on iPhone appstore is getting quite popular also, and are featured in the popular/top lists more frequently.
Did a quick search, and apparently since september there’s more books than any other category of apps released to the appstore http://blog.flurry.com/bid/27796/Flurry-Smartphone-Industry-Pulse-October-2009 And even Jamie Oliver is listed (although not a plain book, but with some “multimedia” content to boot) with a cookbook as top paid app #38 in UK right now