media seo analytics | push2digital - Filed under 'Rupert Murdoch'

April 29, 2010

Murdoch's Metrics a Private Matter

Don't look for ABC metric reports that show the expected traffic decline once the paywall is raised on two major British news sites.

The Times Online's last public metrics showed approximately 1.2M unique browsers per day. According to a recent study, News Corp should expect that number to drop to about 60,772 per day. The media giant is banking that 60K users per day paying approximately $3 a week is a better long-term strategy than trying to monetize the 1.2M non-paying visitors via advertising.

With nearly a month to go before News International raises its first paywall in June, both Times Online and Sun Online have stopped publishing their user numbers through the ABC in the UK.

Times Online’s last published traffic was 20,418,256 unique browsers in February, an average 1,215,446 a day and an average 4,980,134 daily page impressions. A third of traffic was domestic, two thirds from overseas.

Filed under // Rupert Murdoch analytics media paywall

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March 26, 2010

Murdoch Sets 'Fair Price' for Digital Journalism ... @ $3 week

The tip of the spear, sort of speak, for News Corp., will be UK's The Times and the Sunday Times publications. The company is moving ahead with a paywall strategy that rewards print subscribers with free online access. The rest will fork over about $3 a week for access come June. Will be interesting to see if they have better luck than Newsday.

The Times and the Sunday Times will form the vanguard of parent company News Corp.'s subscription plans for general news, as the U.K. newspapers move behind a paywall for the first time in June.

News International Ltd., News Corp.'s European division, said Friday the newspapers will launch separate Web sites in early May to replace the existing Times Online site. The two new sites will be available for a free trial period to registered customers, but from June will charge £1 ($1.48) for a day's access or £2 for a week. Payment will give customers access to both sites ...

News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, who said in a letter to employees last month that the company is "instituting fair pricing for digital journalism," has argued that news publishers should charge for content online that for years they have been giving away for free. The issue took on greater significance during the economic slump as advertising revenue dried up.

WSJ.com

Filed under // Rupert Murdoch content news corp newsday paywall seo

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March 17, 2010

Murdoch Blocks Meltwater From Search

Times Online Blocks Media Monitor Meltwater

Public relations news monitor Meltwater, which is still refusing to pay UK newspapers for crawling their websites, has now been blocked from indexing Times Online, the most serious of Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspapers.

The news site, which is due to go behind a paywall this spring and which had already blocked the NewsNow news monitor in January, enacted the block via the standard robots.txt protocol on Tuesday. It means thousands of Meltwater customers around the world won’t get to inform clients when their company is mentioned in The Times.

The move stems from an increasing desire, from both Murdoch’s News International specifically and the rest of the UK press, that commercial crawlers pay them to crawl their sites.

Robert Andrews
@robertandrews Mar 16, 2010 6:19 PM ET

via paidcontent.org

Interesting to note that the defining point as it relates to Rupert Murdoch is that the site Meltwater is a paid service, unlike Google, which for now is off the hook. But for how long?

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Filed under // Rupert Murdoch media paywall seo

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November 17, 2009

Can You Play Hardball With Google?

More on the Murdoch-Google posturing -- Michael Gray is not alone in the belief that media companies might be able to apply pressure to the search giant and pry open that bulging wallet with a bold play.

To me this strategy makes a lot more sense than a subscriber paywall plan -- get paid by the guy making money off your content, not the customer you've raised to expect free content. According to a recent Forrester study, 80 percent of consumers said they wouldn’t pay for access to online content if the publisher erects a pay wall.

By Michael Gray on November 16th, 2009
In Featured, SEO

In the past week there’s been a lot talk about the Wall Street Journal threatening to pull its content from Google and why it’s a good idea or sheer lunacy.
Let’s be clear. I think this entire thing is saber rattling on both sides and that Murdoch really just wants a “piece of the action.” I don’t think he wants the Wall Street Journal to be out of the index any more than Google is being flippant about whether they are in the index or not. However, if you are going to play hardball and draw a line in the sand, you have to be willing to hold your ground–or at least convince everyone you are–for it to work.

... While it’s unlikely, if Bing was able to get a lot of the big newspapers to sign exclusively, Google’s index would take a measurable drop in quality, which could completely screw Google.