Murdoch dumps WSJ fees

MEDIA magnate Rupert Murdoch says News Corporation will drop the subscription model used by the online site of its latest masthead The Wall Street Journal in favour of free access.

Mr Murdoch said the company hopes to generate at least 10 to fifteen times as much traffic to the WSJ site by making it free. The company will make more money by attracting more readers, he said.

News Corporation is expected to complete its acquisition of WSJ owners Dow Jones – announced last month – by the end of the year.

Speaking at the annual News shareholder in meeting in Adelaide, Mr Murdoch said: “We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having 1 million (subscribers), having at least 10 million to 15 million in every corner of the earth.”

The WSJ.com site is one of the few internet sites to have successfully introduced a subscription model – charging its million readers an annual fee of US$50 (A$55).

After spending much the nineties as an online sceptic before ultimately becoming a big investor, Mr Murdoch told the meeting the internet was now generating US$1 billion a year for the company

While not expressing surprise at the size of the internet revenue, he did remark it was somewhat unsual given it came from a sector that “didn’t exist” as recently as a few years ago.

“I'd like to be able to say it was great prescience on my part but there's a certain amount of luck to it,” he said.

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FT charges for content, sort of

THE famed London masthead, the Financial Times, has announced a groundbreaking new system for charging users for accessing content, finding a middle ground between a subscription service and free content.

As part of a broad relaunch of the Financial Times Internet arm – FT.com – the company will expand the amount of content it offers free, but then to charge the user a subscription rate after a predetermined number of page views.

The new model will enable blogs, news aggregators and other websites to access FT.com content and link to it more freely. It replaces the current restrictions on access to business stories and premium content.

Users will be able to view a total of 30 FT articles per month – including news, columns, analysis and video content – after which they will be asked to pay a subscription. A “light touch” registration process kicks in after viewing five articles.

“Our new access model means FT.com is open for business in a new way,” said FT.com publisher and managing editor Ien Cheng.

“Other publishers have been caught in a stark choice between free versus paid. We are now offering a third way, in which you only pay if you want more than 30 articles per month.”

The figure of 30 page views was not random, but rather based on detailed analysis of FT.com user patterns, Mr Cheng said.

The changes come into effect in the middle of October.

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