Quote:
Originally Posted by mynameisjim
That's what I was saying above. I have a strong feeling the other news outlets will quickly fall in line. The reason: the added viewership they might gain by staying free won't matter since on-line ad revenue isn't enough to keep them afloat, even if they doubled it in most cases.
On-line ad revenue only works when your product is free to produce or virtually free. It will never command the type of money that TV/radio/newspaper advertising does regardless of traffic. This is a proven fact now so on-line newspaper sites don't really care about free traffic anymore since it's been proven unable to support their costs.
There are no options left. This may not work, but it's all they can do. On-line ad revenue simply won't cover the costs of actual journalism.
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We'll see...they may be suffering but they may also get a significant percentage of visitors that were going to Murdoch-owned sites that don't want to pay. If I were the other conglomerates, I would wait and see so that Murdoch is taking all the risks.
Chances are what will happen is some of the large news conglomerates will get buried while others will figure out how to reduce overhead enough to keep at least the online news free, plus with fewer big players, there'd be more revenue going to the remaining ones. It may not be as lucrative as it used to be, but news flash: internet changed and is continuing to change the world...some stuff isn't going to be as easy to do. It could just be that there's too many big players splitting up the pie too much for it to work and some of them failing will allow the remaining ones to make enough to make it work.