News International, which owns the Times and the Sunday Times, will start charging to access its web sites from June, it said today.
The Times will cost £1 per day, or £2 for a week's subscription, News International said.
Rupert Murdoch has been making noises for some time about charging for his online content - a newspaper now in his stable, the Wall Street Journal, has charged for online content since its inception.
The Times Online site, which currently hosts both the Times and the Sunday Times, will be split into two separate sites, and a redesign will be introduced in early May, for a trial period.
If you take up the subscription, you'll gain access to both of these sites when the online payment scheme goes live in June.
Editor of the Times, James Harding, interviewed on BBC TV this morning, said that he believed the content of his newspaper was better than other UK dailies and people would be willing to pay a premium rather than go to other news sites that will remain free.
That remains to be seen. A subscription to the Wall Street Journal gives access to current and historical financial data, including Dow Jones information, as well as providing solid news coverage.
Given the choice between paying £1 to view the Times online, or sauntering down to the newsagent to pay a £1 for the paper version, many will take the time to go out of their front doors and into the real world.
Murdoch is believed to be contemplating introducing similar pay schemes across many of the newspapers in his extensive press empire.
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When you pay for content on the internet it usually means you give up your real life identity. That combined with what you think (i.e. read) is an extremely valuable commodity.
It is also information that can be used against you should it come to that. It infringes on your right to privacy and to hold your own thoughts. It is why authorities shouldn't know what you check out of the library.
The internet offers tremendous cost savings over print. Murdoch is an extremely greedy man and too stupid to know how to successfully associate content with advertisement or advertisement with content. Or to successfully make the argument that ads should be paid for even if they aren't clicked on.
The identity driven information Murdoch could glean from you is even greater than anything Google ever imagined.
Unless you go back to the age where you buy everything exclusively on cash, you are prone to "surveilance". Any credit card bill can be used as a diary of his/her owner. You can choose between privacy or easyness. You can be found suspicious too if you only make payments in cash, authorities might be concerned if you are trying to hide some illicit behavior....
The daily view charge might be unappealing, for the same price of the printed version. But the weekly fee is far more advantageous, you get to read 7 papers for the price of two. Usually, free online versions of papers doesn't deliver all the content of the printed or subscribed ones. If I can read the same material of the printed version, I think it's quite worthy the price.
Not to mention that online reading means less wasted natural resources, in trees, water and etc.
Many publications – such as the Wall Street Journal for example – have already gone down this route and others are considering the same.
The ongoing challenge for publishers, in the aftermath of installing pay walls, will be to ensure their customers are aware of the valuable and compelling content being created by their journalists. This could very easily be content that readers would be more than happy to pay for, but which they might not even know exists. Getting the balance right between the availability of free content and access to paid-for content will be crucial.
As a truly global media monitoring company, Meltwater believes we can play a valuable role in this regard. We are already creating global awareness of restricted content behind login pages and pay walls for numerous media outlets such as the Financial Times. We promote and market their restricted content to a global audience of potential paying readers and thereby drive traffic and revenue for our partnering publishers.
Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Meltwater (http://meltwater.com/en/who-we-are)
get them no good cheeky bull
into the big bloody chip, jumbro!
What's the jolly jumbucks
you've got in your tucker bag?
Oh, You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda
for fee, or hit the highway