The entire newspaper publishing industry is watching Rupert Murdoch's pay wall experiment closely to see if it works or not. And so far the results are not looking good but Murdoch has another agenda.
MediaWeek reports that according to ComScore, the websites for the News Corp-owned Times and its sister newspaper, The Sunday Times, have lost 1.2 million viewers in the three months since the formerly free site was reorganized and split into two separate sites - thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk – and placed behind a paywall. The problem for newspapers is that people don't like paying for things that they have been getting for free.
But then, Murdoch has more radical ideas. He has outlined plans to target young people by setting up a digital newspaper that would be distributed through the iPad, tablets and mobile phones. "We'll have young people reading newspapers," the 79-year-old Murdoch said. "It's a real game changer in the presentation of news."
Murdoch is trying to do two things here: make the Internet pay, and attract young people to news. That's his big challenge, neither will be easy. No news organisation has achieved that. To make it work, he might have to make some acquisitions and pick up something that has a strong youth following. But then, he once did that with MySpace and that failed.
Newspaper publishers around the world will be watching closely.
no comment untill now