Rob Andrews from Paid Content was our latest guest speaker. His advice to us was ‘always attribute, always link to.’
Rob works from home with his laptop and video camera. He is a self-sufficient journalist and he says that this is increasingly the way that journalism is going.
In regards to paid content, apparently online advertising is more efficient than traditional means as it allows people to advertise alongside key words. This means they can easily access their target audience.
The recession has been a double-hit for media institutions as not only have they suffered in terms of loss of advertising revenue, but competition is now also tougher in terms of getting people to buy their content.
Online content is obviously the biggest challenge facing media organisations. The amount of free content now available on the web means that more readers are accessing their news in this way and media organisations lose yet more money.
Rupert Murdoch has long been demanding pay walls on content from media organisations within his NewsCorp group. He accuses search engines such as Google and Bing.com of stealing. Actually, he refers to them as ‘content kleptomaniacs’.
Murdoch had previously agreed a deal with Bing so that his NewsCorp content would be exclusively available to them. The purpose of this was really to vent his anger at Google and ‘hurt’ them to the worst of his ability.
It seems though that Murdoch may have struck a swift blow. The latest news in this now lengthy saga is that Google have responded by making new moves to allow publishers to limit free news access.
This means that after a Google user has clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day, they may start to see a registration page.
This will allow publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing their content on a regular basis.
Josh Cohen, Google senior business product manager says: ‘whether you’re offering your content for free or selling it, it’s crucial that people find it. Google can help with that.’
Whether or not these two concepts can be reconciled is something that remains to be seen.
This is a really interesting development and one must wonder what’s in it for google to start this five clicks til you pay system. They must be taking a cut for themselves as before this it seems search engines have been the bane of the newspapers lives.