Saturday, August 8, 2009

Murdoch Changing Another Media Model?

According to The Guardian and Mashable, Murdoch plans to start charging for online news and he expects to make a profit. If he does, of course all media will follow like they did when he created his first profit horse business model and transformed the nature of news into entertainment.


I wonder what Murdoch is really thinking? Perhaps he figures that traffic volume isn't that important? So many people interact with News Corp owned media that if it reduces by ten, twenty, even fifty percentage points then who cares? 50% of Facebook readers is still 15 million people.

Meanwhile, Digg seems to be embedding semi-incognito advertisements in content. People can still vote ads up or down meaning bad ads will get buried quickly, but is this the future or a blur between product and content that crosses the line?

I'm going to read Chris Anderson's Free by the end of the week and I should have more ideas on the future of media, but for now I thought I'd share Murdoch's intentions and Digg's plan so we could see what comes of it together.


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Stephen Shiffman and the Land Of No will release their album in ten days. It will be well worth a listen.



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