Micropayments For Wall Street Journal Website Planned By News Corp.

Financial Times:

News Corp plans to introduce micro-payments for individual articles and premium subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal's website this year in a milestone in the news industry's race to find better online business models.

"A sophisticated micropayments service" will launch this autumn, Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Journal, told the Financial Times.

Read the whole story: Financial Times

Comments

[dansac]

Micropayments are a terrible idea. No one seems to have thought through what this would mean for journalists and journalism. More on that here:

http://thedigitalists.com/2009/05/12/what-would-micropayments-mean-for-journalists/

[luke150]

There is so much info out there, it will be ridiculous to pay. WSJ and Murdock really think they are something special. On the other hand, they will probably make money, the Wall Street crowd follows WSJ religiously. Maybe that explains their collective failures recently, too much crowd mentality, too little original and independent thinking.

[cdub1991]

Yeah, well, good luck with that. No one to date has been been able to make micropayments work in the marketplace. Consumer's have just never taken to the model.

That said, if anybody knows a good existing software solution for implementing this, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

[smchp]

This has "FAIL" written all over it!

[ThePeacemakers]

As far as all newspapers go, subcription services online is a good idea.

Everybody going after the same advertisers makes everyone dependent on the same corporations, businesses for income and our information content becomes more and more controlled by who's advertising.
And, for goodness sakes, if pop-ups can be reduced (some sites make you leave off the pop off blocker for certain accesses) the online experience will be greatly enhanced.

There has to be a point where content (information and entertainment) has to have a value intrinsic in itself and for the MONEY people put into creating content and information it is only fair to pay for it.

[tomasedison]

Murdock can get more revenue by opening up the WSJ as a free site and depending on the revenue from click-driven advertising.

Of course the right wingnuts will be totally unwilling to cough up one red cent to read any of the dribble from FOX news.

[Uosdwis]

Micro probably=$1. Because it costs a certain amount of money to process any payment, we'll never get to the point where you could pay a penny or even less than a penny for something, let alone a nickel or a dime or a quarter. So you might as well just pay $5 a month or $10 or whatever, if you can spare it. But all the myriad services out there would quickly bankrupt you if really had to start paying for it.

[LoRiseAntlers]

I think he needs to call up Ted Stevens,and have him explain the whole "series of tubes" thing to him,because that makes just as much sense as this awesome business move.

[jazabelz]

I wouldn't pay a penny to read anything Murdock produces. If he can't get advertisers to run their ads on his formats -- then too bad. With the internet there are simply too many reliable sources to obtain facts, we just don't need these dinosaurs of media dissemination any more.

[WorldGoneWild]

Agreed. I'll say all my goodbyes to the NY Post now. I can live without it.

[Ozarks]

Maybe the FCC can use this Murdock Tactic to revoke all his waivers.

[NevaforLeadership]

Maybe the bottom line is that newspapers in paper print and interenet form are on their way out forever.

They can set up any internet model they like, but they will still have to compete with network and cable internet sites.

Ultimately we are going to be able to watch TV online. We already can to some degree. The winners in this media war will be the online TV channels. We will then pay the internet suppliers for bundled packages of TV channels.

Hopefully we won't have to subsidize sites/TV channels that would never survivie if they weren't bundled, as we have to now.

[gypsy508]

The problem with newspapers began long before there even was in Internet. The journalism just got bad with the consolidation of the media, maybe as the unions weakened as well. Journalism became the lowest paid profession among those requiring college degrees. The 2004 Census lists it around 27K median and 33K with a masters degree. Most jobs start at around 20K. I began at one of Murdoch's papers for $6.75 an hour in the mid-1980s, non-union part-time. My first full-time job I got $19,000 and I even had an assistant and a freelance budget. If people are now going to expect news for free, they should be prepared for the fact that no one in their right mind would ever go to school for journalism right now.

.

[klondiker]

I think that eventually newspapers will end up adopting a similar model to the one used in television - as in, there will be a central "provider" just like a cable company that will be the link between the content creators and the consumers. Just like we subscribe to certain channels, we will be able to subscribe to a number of different news companies to deliver content through the web for one monthly price. I imagine there will be more specialization - rather than focusing on all news, individual papers will focus and develop specialities in certain areas.

[DurantImboden]

Murdoch is late to the party: CompuServe was selling newspaper and magazine articles from online databases back in the 1980s, and quite a few newspapers were movng week-old articles into pay-per-view archives only a few years ago.

It's certainly possible that some WSJ stories will have enough value for business readers to justify "micropayments." But if Murdoch thinks micropayments are going to save the NEW YORK POST and other run-of-the-mill dailies from having to run quack weight-loss or dating-service ads on their Web sites, he's living in a fantasy world.

[Charity]

i know newspapers are hurting - and i mourn the loss of their numbers. but a new model over the internet has been cast, and there may never be a workable answer as to how news organizations can make it as profitable as print...unless the fee for online ad content is raised.

subscriptions have been tried in the past for access via the web and they have never worked. one way or the other, you can find it online for free, and if you can't, you don't care about it....you move on. and therein lies the problem. to make money i would think that a site must have content that can be found no where else and is valued enough for people to pay for it.

plus, it only takes a few subscribers to undermine the cash flow by copying/pasting paid-for content to any popular blog-site, such as huffpost.