The End of Free Online News?

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannysullivan/ / CC BY 2.0

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

How To Get Into The Google Index

Getting into the Google Index is vital for all websites and blogs. Google is the number 1 website in the Alexa rankings (www.alexa.com.) That means that it is the most used search engine and therefore having your site in it's index can be vital for increasing site traffic. If your site isn't in it then it cannot be returned by a Google search. Here's how to get into it:

Step 1. Sign into Google Webmaster Tools with a Google account at www.google.com/webmasters/tools.

Step 2. Click 'Add a Site' and enter your site's URL.

Step 3. Select which verification method you wish to use, for this example we will use Meta Tag. You will then need to insert the Meta Tag html code into your site's home page. You will then have to wait until the Google 'spiders' have crawled your site to check and analyse your page.

Google spiders follow links and analyse the pages to put them into the index. The more times they crawl your page the better meaning regular updates are very important. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important also. You can check your sites progress at places like Alexa (above) and also www.seoworkers.com, on seoworkers, under tools and then analyser to analyse and check your SEO.

Channel Four Continues to Lead The Way...

Photo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/galaxyfm/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Channel Four announced plans with YouTube today which will allow YouTube users to watch full length Channel Four shows, free of charge. The broadcaster is now the first in the world to make content available on the Google owned video sharing website.

The videos on YouTube would be very similar to the ones on Channel Fours' 4OD service which allows Internet users to watch repeats of shows such as Hollyoaks and Skins. Ther will be around 3,000 hours of programmes being uploaded to the video sharing website.

The move by Channel Four is another move by the broadcaster to lead the way in online television viewing as it was also the first broadcaster to allow viewers to watch programmes online via their 4OD service. The move into online television was followed by other broadcasters such as the BBC who created the i-player.

In return for giving the video content to YouTube, Channel Four will be allowed to sell advertising space around the very popular website and according to The Times, it is expected that Channel Four will take around 70 per cent of revenue from the ads whilst also being able to advertise around other videos. With advertising playing such an importnat role in new media technologies, and more importantly the Internet, this could prove to be a lucrative deal for Channel Four as it continues to run as an independent broadcaster with no access to the licence fee that the BBC receives.

The content will be available in the coming months but will be fully available come 2010.