Last week, international news mogul Rupert Murdoch made headlines himself by announcing all the properties of his News Corporation would start to charge for all online content.
He is betting that by leading the charge in pay-for-content (his properties include Fox News, Sky News, Wall Street Journal, to name a few), his competitors will all be forced to follow suit.
This would, of course, reverse the years-long trend of news sites providing free content to generate large traffic to help sell ad space.
Will Murdoch’s decision pay off for News Corp.? Will his decision spur a revolution that brings about an end to free news content on the Web? What will his decision mean for news search engines such as Google News or content aggregation sites such as Drudge Report?
Only time will tell — but some, like the folks leaving comments on this Mashable story, aren’t so bully on Murdoch’s decision.
Others, like Mark Cuban, think Murdoch’s decision will work out just fine.
If, in fact, this leads to a pay-for-content revolution (and even if it doesn’t, since the lack of free News Corp. content will leave a big hole on the Internet) — we see nothing but opportunity for independent content producers.
We’re not just talking about bloggers and small news sites. We’re talking about companies, non-profits, political campaigns — any organization who decides to fill void of free content with their own free, unique content.
When larger “traditional” news organizations start to charge for their content — look for an even bigger, faster explosion in the growth in use and importance of citizen journalists.
Look for Drudge Report to start linking more to user-generated video sharing sites like YouTube — and blogs, and even Twitter posts. Better yet, perhaps Drudge will start focusing more on production of its own FREE original content.
As we’ve seen with major international news stories over the past year — the Iran elections, the China earthquake, etc. — citizen journalists are scooping traditional media with compelling, real-time content. That free content becomes so much more valuable when competing against content that you can only access if you have your credit card handy.
So, perhaps traditional media organizations will make a killing by charging for content. Perhaps their loss of audience-driven ad revenue will be offset by the money they make off subscriptions.
But we’re more focused on the opportunity it provides any organization willing to step in and fill the free content void left by Rupert and his club.
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[...] this week, we posted about news titan Rupert Murdoch’s decision to start charging for new content on all of his [...]
[...] echoes many of the same themes we shared in our previous post on “pay-for-content”: Many companies are trying to protect their bottom lines by putting up pay walls. However, this [...]