Granted publishing billionaire Rupert Murdoch is a smart cookie, but we’ve been wondering if perhaps he’s finally hit the wall with the digital age. First he boasted getting onboard by designing his own handheld reading device, and then he more recently about-faced and was going to dump his ‘eReader’ in favor of providing content to existing eReaders. (He owns a lot of newspapers.)
Well this article at BBC has Rupert declaring that his News Corp is now going to start charging for content on his many online news resources. (Old story, painful lesson to come.) This after losing $3.4 billion in the first half of this year.  He needs new revenue streams and is going to make the mistake of driving people away to free news providers by charging for what he used to give away. Since the Internet will not be shaped to suit anyone’s will, (especially outmoded business models) we are looking toward his next $3 billion in losses.
I’ve got one thing to say: “What are you going to do when that doesn’t work?”
There is a way to charge for content, many specialty news addresses, like specialty television channels have done it, because there is a special audience. You just can’t charge for anything pulled from a wire service. Adapt or Die. The Internet favors the small and flexible, so News Corp’s losses are just evidence of those processes at work, yah?
