A few blog posts ago I wrote about how Rupert Murdoch and other publishers have been discussing ways to charge the public for viewing online news from newspaper websites. This issue has been circulating the journalism world for a while now, especially as newspaper readerships continue to dwindle, which therefore sees advertising revenue decrease as a result.
This week has seen two big announcements which have made the possibility of charging for online news more real. Earlier this week, Johnston Press (The UK's largest regional newspaper publisher) announced plans to begin charging for access to six of it's online titles. A move which has come about following a 42% slump in advertising revenue. This is a clear indication that news in traditional newspaper format is a dieing trade as the Internet continues to dominate the media world.
The second announcement came today from search engine Google, which has said it will limit the amount of free news available to people using the site. Google plays a massive role when it comes to websites and their traffic. Getting into the Google Index (which makes your site available to Google searches) is pretty key when it comes to earning more traffic, purely down to the amount of traffic and users Google gets itself. The move follow claims that the search engine is profiting from from online news pages through online advertising revenue.
The new changes will mean that publishers can now limit users to no more than five pages per day without subscribing or registering and may mean that users will start to see registration screens when they click for a sixth time.
I think that over the new few years more and more news websites will be charging viewers to read their online content, especially as online news continues to win the battle against newspapers, an especially as newspaper revenue continues to suffer.
The battle between Old Media and New Media rages on, but these recent developments seem to suggest that the tide is continuing to turn in favour of New Media and inparticular, The Internet.
BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8389896.stm
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