On our recent AGN/QGL discussions, Media Watch focussed on Murdoch's push for user pays news content and changing media delivery business models.

Media Watch streaming and transcript

Some of the s*** that comes out of Murdoch's mouth is unbelievable!

Rupert Murdoch: The Philistine phase of the digital age is almost over. The aggregators and the plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content.

— Rupert Murdoch address at the World Media Summit, Beijing, 9th October, 2009

But news.com.au is crap.

That's what I don't get.

Basically you have state-sponsored media content being delivered by the ABC which is more or less really high-quality stuff.

Then you have some cocked-up partially fictional bulls*** being delivered by a private company, sold of as 'news'

And the private company complains that the state sponsored company is killing the commercial market.

I reckon if you deliver premium, high quality content, then people will pay. Noone in their right mind would pay for news dot com dot au crap.

Noone in their right mind would pay for news dot com dot au crap.

i hear trog has his CC ready and waiting


but srsly, people will pay.

i sort of agree with rupert.

its pretty obvious to see that the internet is going to be more and more commercialised, and we've all had it good for a long time.

we'll get charged for pretty much everything sooner or later.

also, im quite happy to read news.com as one of my news/entertainment sources.

ive got no issues reading the fictional bulls*** and find it easy to distinguish between the real stuff and "entertainment"

i guess if you cant, youd probably shoudlnt read news.com

But it says on new dot com dot au site that they are the news site of the year so it must be worth the money. A website said it so it must be true.

If he's losing money from people not buying newspapers then it makes sense to charge to use news dot com. But that site is only good for entertainment value and there's no way in hell I'd be f***ing paying for that crap.

When it finally comes time to start paying I'll find somewhere else that has free news.

the plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content.

I laugh at that. So much of Murdoch's 'journalists' work is plagiarized. They copy articles from blogs, even ones taking the piss without even verifying the source or validity of the info...

what a total douchebag

Pretty much every move Rupey has made in the online space has been 100% wrong (hahah Myspace).

This is just another facet of media companies struggling with the digital era. Information has been freed by the internet and unless they manage to completely change the way it works - I'm looking at you now Senator c***roy - the period of adjustment will involve much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Murdoch has some valid arguments, they would just be better served coming from someone else's mouth.

If there is no money in reporting news, the quality of news reporting will (and has) gone down. The trick for media companies will be to produce something worth paying for and I have no idea what that would even look like at this point.

His stance on aggregation seems weird also. I've ended up at newscorp websites far more often than I would like through google news, so in that sense they are actually making him money.

I love the ABC at the moment, but who knows what will happen with it in the future, there is definitely a space for commercial media in the marketplace. They will just have to be content with less than they had.

If there is no money in reporting news, the quality of news reporting will (and has) gone down

There is and always will be money in news, regardless of whether online subscriptions take off.

However there is likely to be nowhere near enough room for the number of players that there are at the moment.

I'm very interested to see Apple's subscription model for books & magazines for their forthcoming reader. It would be pretty friggen amazing to have entire libraries of current and former publications mobile, pleasantly accessible, and rationally priced. If it had a slick interface (which, you'd expect it would), it would be pretty cool to subscribe to all your favorite magazines and read them either archived or on the fly. Seeing how they gave mobile devices a kick in the bum, if they could one-up the kindle my credit card will be awaiting. :)

I reckon Rupes is bringing himself down.

That s*** website of his publishes too much for free (same for most online newspapers).

If you look at magazine websites like New Scientist, National Geographic - their website is more of an advertisement. They offer quite a few of their quality articles as an entree for free, but then you have to buy the product to get right into it.

So at the moment NS and NatGeo product is printed goods. But who knows what form it will take later. The business model still holds if you wrap the premium goods with a subscription service.

The problem with everyday news is that it's hardly premium. Reuters et al pump out their s*** and daily printed media gobble it up and supplement with their own local news and call it a 'quality service'. It's not.

I agree with some of his sentiments, but at the end of the day he needs to shut up, put his money where his mouth is, and see if the change he wants to make is going to be commercially viable. If it's not and they start hemorrhaging money then they'll have to try something else.

I'd love to see some of his sites become pay-per-view because I think it would jumpstart the s*** out of the industry one way or another.

They do charge for ads though dont they? is it just that they arent making enough from the ads on the websites?

A better idea would be ISP's getting together with content providers to supply content free for subscribers.

Bigpond kinda did this, but more with "exclusive" content, I dont think it should be exclusive content, but that your ISP pays to have content delivered free from certain service providers.

Dont know its thats realy a better idea though.

They do charge for ads though dont they? is it just that they arent making enough from the ads on the websites?

Well from the quote above, Murdoch is mostly pissed at "plagiarists" (bloggers) and "aggregators" (Google). The former because they just rip off his content and post it as their own, paying lip service to copyright laws by quoting, rewriting and citing in the most insultingly small, useless manner possible (see: most blogs), and the latter because they literally rip the content off his sites and display it on their own (ignoring the fact that it no doubt drives staggering amounts of traffic to his sites), like news.google.com does.

I'm sure they make lots of money from the ads, given the amount of traffic they no doubt receive. And I don't for one SECOND believe the ads will magically go away if news.com.au (or whatever) becomes a pay-per-view site. I think its really more that he wants to create a structured system of payment for content syndication in his ideal "New Digital Age" in which companies like Google are paying to scrape his content and bloggers etc are paying to reference/cite his content.

yeh there is a limited amount of truth to where he's coming from, but it's really a big 'well duh' imo
the rest of his crap is just emotional kneejerk bulls*** though

get over it and move with the times, a******

I agree with your idea `ViPER`- I'm surprised film and music publishers in general haven't tried to make some deals in this area already. The problem is they have no leverage. ISPs make good cash from users who want 150GB quotas to download Linux ISOs - what do publishers have to bargain with?

iiNet made some in-roads, particularly with their streaming EPL. That was one of the reasons I signed up to iiNet, not having Foxtel.

I think trog's on the money though, we need less talk and more action now. Get your hands dirty, Rupes.

and l2 robots.txt if it's really making you cry, I reckon

But then aforementioned massive traffic attack wouldn't happen!

They need the trafic now to get readers on the hook for when they lock the s*** down.

I'm sure they make lots of money from the ads, given the amount of traffic they no doubt receive. And I don't for one SECOND believe the ads will magically go away if news.com.au (or whatever) becomes a pay-per-view site.

So its not that they arent making money, its that they arent making enough money, or just arent making the kind of returns they expected, not comparable to what they used to make from newspapers.

The problem is they have no leverage. ISPs make good cash from users who want 150GB quotas to download Linux ISOs - what do publishers have to bargain with?

Yup, content is already free - ASP models for wireline are effectively white elephants I reckon, chopped off at the knees, since through iiNet & co we've collectively decided to just download it. No alternative for VOD since we don't have the bandwidth.

Books and magazines seem pretty safe because having a library on the go, and immediately available is something worth paying for that can't be easily substituted (yet)?

Videos are interesting. If this court case goes pear shaped for the industry we might see a resurgence, but looking forward it seems paid for content is all mobile?

and l2 robots.txt if it's really making you cry, I reckon

Explain to us noobs please.

I had a disturbing thought when it was mentioned that News alone would not be the product. It would be incorporated into a News + Networking + movies + entertainment.

So in fact its more like the PayTV model where you pay for News (sky/cnn etc) as part of a basic package of access to sites.
That works well for PayTV because there are no competitors.

The internet has plenty of competitors so the only way this will work is if other sites are going to be BLOCKED.
How do you block sites ?
An Internet Filter ?

and l2 robots.txt if it's really making you cry, I reckon

Explain to us noobs please.

one of the things he's crying about is that Google are scraping his pages and caching them and putting them in their search results, and he wants them to pay for that priviledge (it makes more sense when you think that they're including things like image thumbnails, etc).

If they REALLY don't want google to do that, they can put a file called robots.txt on their web server and instruct search engines like Google to not index their pages. Google will check that file and then ignore the page(s) that they don't want indexed.

Of course, doing this would be suicide, because I reckon they get a significant percentage of their traffic from Google.

All the TV news stations here in Australia have a deal where they all share their News resources. Of course you will get the "scoop" sometimes but mostly its a shared pool which they all benefit from and sell Ads to fund it.

The problem isnt the sharing or pilfering of News. Murdochs sites pilfer news too. Its the fact that Ad revenue has collapsed.

Its the fact that Ad revenue has collapsed.

s*** no way. I agree with you 100% on something.

I think thats it right there people.

Yeah, Ad revenue has collapsed temporarily - but what goes around comes around. Soon Ad revenue with be 'very good value' (read:cheap) again, and then it will buoy, just like any other industry.

Interesting that the NYT announced 100 jobs gone yesty.

Ad revenue is a funny model, because if you restrict the amount of advertising you have, you have a bid for the spot if there is enough interest in it, allowing competition needing to buy it to make sure their competition doesn't elevating its price well beyond what it should be. Followed by when there is a decline, creating a huge void in the over-inflated price to what it would actually be if supply actually does meet demand.

Of course can the businesses find a good model to work with in the interim till marketing kicks back up? I doubt subscription is the answer.

Its the fact that Ad revenue has collapsed.

s*** no way. I agree with you 100% on something.

I think thats it right there people.

On what grounds do you think it has collapsed? AusGamers advertising is definitely down this year on last year but there is no way I would say that it has 'collapsed'. Google certainly doesn't seem to be struggling either.

Well it's speculation from that model i was talking about, but the prices for limited and highly sought after advertising spots (on places like news.com.au) I'd assume were massively inflated, and I'm sure that even though the rest of the industry on average may have only lost 5% of its revenue, it should have as a top teir advertising spot lost quite a bit more than that.

Speculation, just speculation. I said that I agree'd with him, not that he was right, because I don't know if its right. But I think that a 10% loss of ad revenue would hit them pretty hard, and if I had a uninformed guess, that would be how much I think they could potentially have lost.

On what grounds do you think it has collapsed? AusGamers advertising is definitely down this year on last year but there is no way I would say that it has 'collapsed'. Google certainly doesn't seem to be struggling either.

Ad revenue is coming from two sources with News (company).
Print media and online
What should happen is they should make their newspapers free.
When both are free they can move onto a new model.
At the moment its a divided battlefield and Print is getting hammered.
If they make people pay for news online thats going to happen online too.
There is a newspaper in England that is going to be going Free soon.

Ausgamers isnt a newspaper.
If Ausgamers was a newspaper for sale at a newsagent would you be getting the same revenue from Ads in your 'newspaper' compared to your ads online ?
I think not.


last edited by FaceMan at 16:20:51 20/Oct/09

I heard actually it was the classified ad revenue that went down a whole lot. Which is pretty different kettle of advertising than the one i was thinking of. (after a breif reserch through googles)

Also faceman, are your posts supposed to be poetic? Because they look like they should be but I can't figure the poetry out for the life of me.

I can't figure the poetry out for the life of me.

I thought it was iambic pentameter, but I carefully checked. It's not.

Its called Automatic Writing duh!
google it.

A lot of the lost ad revenue is from job advertisements, this money is not coming back as I don't think that job sites will start to charge for access..

A lot of the lost ad revenue is from job advertisements, this money is not coming back as I don't think that job sites will start to charge for access..

Surely seek.com.au charges you to put a job ad up?

i would happily pay for The Australian. it's the only serious right-wing publication in australia.

edit:

I heard actually it was the classified ad revenue that went down a whole lot.

printed classifieds have been hammered, especially in employment and real estate sectors. this recession is only getting started.

last edited by infi at 16:24:31 20/Oct/09

Ad revenue is coming from two sources with News (company).
Print media and online
What should happen is they should make their newspapers free.
When both are free they can move onto a new model.
At the moment its a divided battlefield and Print is getting hammered.
If they make people pay for news online thats going to happen online too.
There is a newspaper in England that is going to be going Free soon.

none of that has anything to do with, well, anything, let alone my question

Ausgamers isnt a newspaper.
If Ausgamers was a newspaper for sale at a newsagent would you be getting the same revenue from Ads in your 'newspaper' compared to your ads online ?
I think not.

this also has nothing to do with anything

A lot of the lost ad revenue is from job advertisements, this money is not coming back as I don't think that job sites will start to charge for access..

Surely seek.com.au charges you to put a job ad up?

yep

Start charging for access to QGL and see how that affects your Site Visits.
Your content will become worthless because nobody will pay for it.
Nobody is viewing ads on your site.
What must you do ? make it free.

printed classifieds have been hammered, especially in employment and real estate sectors. this recession is only getting started.

thats got nothing to do with the GFC though, thats just that people dont want to look for jobs, houses or cars in print media anymore when online is so much better/easier.

Obviously someone is making money from sites like seek, carsales and realestate.com.au

seek and carsales and realestate are not funding a news gathering network.

Start charging for access to QGL and see how that affects your Site Visits.
Your content will become worthless because nobody will pay for it.
Nobody is viewing ads on your site.
What must you do ? make it free.

that's still not an answer to the question I asked; what makes you think advertising has collapsed? You know the rules, or should by now; you need to back up big bold stupid claims like that, especially when someone comes along with competing evidence (mine is anecdotal, because I can't disclose the commercial situation for obvious reasons, other than to say advertising for us has FAR from collapsed, and I would logically extrapolate that to meaning it hasn't collapsed for news.com.au either - in fact I bet they're making a f***ton of money because 90% of the s*** that they put up their is regurgitated s*** from other syndicated news sources, their existing news services, or (somewhat ironically) other blogs/youtube/sites

I didnt know we were having a private discussion ?
You arent the only one posting in the thread.
I dont devote my entire post to one of your questions.

The thread is about the Media Watch story.

I didnt know we were having a private discussion ?
You arent the only one posting in the thread.
I dont devote my entire post to one of your questions.

The thread is about the Media Watch story.

then stop quoting me and replying nonsense?

edit: and, if you're going to make claims like "advertising has collapsed" you prolly should at least back them up so people that are interested in why this is the case and how much it's affected their business model, like me, can go and read more. like this one!

You're The Boss.

I don't want to be the boss, I just want to have a real discussion about something I find really interesting because it's a sector I work closely in that involves real data and real opinions rather than idle speculation.

Everything I've read about Murdoch implies that he's almost bugf*** insane, which I find hard to believe (...although, myspace); I assume he has a cunning plan and this is all just posturing until we get to the real point.

If I could hazard a guess Trog, I think what FaceMan is getting at is that advertising in print has collapsed due to massive amounts of cheap (effective??) advertising on the net. It's a two fold hit because the internet space adds to the supply end and because his paper isn't free it has a reduced audience compared to the internet. I can't back that up with hard data, but I wouldn't be surprised if its whats happening.

Besides all of this mainstream media can eat one. It's not like they are above bald faced plagiarism (media watch points it out nearly every week), or for that matter cheap sources of information. Look at funniest home videos. They get hours of footage for what... like 250,000 a year. Thats like 5 camera mans annual salary, they couldn't possibly collect the amount of footage they would receive.

I don't get why people keep calling the ABC free? The ABC has a budget which is paid for by the taxpayer. And, if I'm reading my last pay advice correctly tax seems to be costing me money.

The 2009 budget for the ABC was $1.13 billion. In 2002 (latest year I could find) the number of taxpayers was 2.3 million. So that's about $480 per year to pay for my 'free' content. As a comparison the Wall Street Journal's yearly subscription is about AUD $114.00.

I know there are heaps of other factors in there but seriously if you think Murdoch is a money grabbing arsehole, then what's that make the 'free' ABC?

At least with News I get to choose whether to pay or not.. the ABC just makes me bend over and take it.

yeah thx porno. You prolly said it better than i did.

If you were rupert what would you want ?
lets gets something very clear.
the ABC or Aunty is not the Goliath that NEWS is battling.
Its The BBC,
NEWS can not take on dominance of the internet news until the BBC is privatized.

trog..

i have just completed a huge exercise on the subject of spiders crawling ‘secure’ content.
what you said about robots.txt.. it’s easier than that.. Just put META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noARCHIVE" on any page you don’t want a spider to archive (if everything then whacking it in a common header is obvious) .. they will still crawl but not cache the content.. this is something we did on heineken.com - because of the age gateway..
during this investigation we looked at various methods of hiding content from users while still displaying it to spiders.. One of the most common grey hat methods (accepted by google) atm can be done in 2 ways. the first way is really secure but slows your page down considerably, the second can be easily spoofed and is the most wide spread method of hiding content by the big sites like New York Times, Forbes, experts exchange etc and i bet will be the method chosen by mr murdoch
you cant spider a web site without the bot being able to naturally see the site.. spiders dont enter a username or password to spider s***.. they just skip all that..if they come to a blockage they give up.. if news sites close their content with real logon scripts then their content won’t be shown to spiders and therefore won’t be indexed by search engines resulting in no visitors
the method is like this - what happens is the site wont load assets to the visitor without a valid session cookie – the logon page stands in front of the linked to page and only comes up if you don’t have a valid session, you can get a valid session cookie by either signing in, or by being on a white list of useragent names. The user agent is usually the browser name and spiders just happen to have their own useragent names.. ie google uses Googlebot
the bottom line is there needs to be a list useragent names that are allowed to crawl the site.. you can also limit this by IP address so that there is a whitelist of spider IP’s however this can slow down the page considerably.. so most sites today use useragent names as the filter.
The thing is that browsers like Mozilla actually let you set the useragent.. so if you call yourself Googlebot there is going to be a lot of paid content that is all of a sudden open to you..
With this info cruise the web and try to find how much paid content is now free!
Have fun kids

edit: META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noARCHIVE" should have <> around it..



last edited by Superform at 04:42:12 21/Oct/09

If you were rupert what would you want ?

be less of a crying bitch about it and move with the times. cease trying to keep things the way they were so my old, outdated business model can survive

lets gets something very clear.

lol
just lol

You are a bigger dick than I am Jim. <3.

Of course, doing this would be suicide, because I reckon they get a significant percentage of their traffic from Google.

So he's just whining for the hell of it? Sounds like a dinosaur waiting for its comet to hit.

the nook

So he's just whining for the hell of it? Sounds like a dinosaur waiting for its comet to hit.

Well, I dunno - the thing you have to keep in mind is he's the representative of a major corporation with many shareholders. When he says things - anything - it can have a real, actual effect on the value of those shares. He could get up at a press conference and say "we're charging for content" or "squiddbabolahiweep" and it would be recorded by hundreds of cameras and broadcast out to the world and have a f***-off real effect on the value of his company.

With that in mind I can't believe he'd just say anything for fun. So I'd like to think he has a secret cunning plan based on some medium-to-long-term strategy.. because otherwise he is just crazy and whining for the hell of it.

The thing is that browsers like Mozilla actually let you set the useragent.. so if you call yourself Googlebot there is going to be a lot of paid content that is all of a sudden open to you..
With this info cruise the web and try to find how much paid content is now free!
Have fun kids

I changed my useragent in about:config and tried to confirm this but couldn't find any examples.

Interesting though.