Value for money and The Times Paywall
Who knows what the online news market will look like in 5 years time? Everyone's betting on free prevailing, but News Corp, the owner of The Times, has some serious clout in terms of finance and influence.
It's highly likely that The Times will lose the majority of its online audience to other sources, but news organisations have for years bemoaned the lack of brand loyalty on the internet, so this won't be seen as a huge problem; should the big paywall experiment fail, readers will probably drift back to The Times.
Can The Times Online survive despite free competition? It's reasonably safe to assume at least one quality daily will remain free for a few years at least. Telegraph Media Group turned a profit whilst its rivals made significant losses, so why fix something which is working? Also the Guardian, whilst making significant losses, has made quite a lot of noise against the paywall model, marking it as an unlikely contender to join the experiment.
One of the biggest problems for me is not just the concept of paying, but whether I get value for money. A TV license is currently £144.50 whilst The Times is set to charge £2 per week, which amounts to £104.00 per year. If I had to choose between telly and a newspaper...
An annual subscription to Newsweek magazine is currently £45.00, and for that you get a physical magazine delivered to your door.
On the surface the Times paywall does not offer value for money, for the casual reader at least. But there are several factors that suggest News Corp are in it for the long game, not least of which the news that subscribers to the print version (at least some packages) will apparently get free access online, which immediately sounds like a much higher value package.
The BBC news website is seen as a sticking point for paid-for rivals. Murdochs junior and senior have called for the BBC to be tamed, and Lord Mandelson made an accusation back in November that David Cameron had already made a deal in exchange for political support of News Corp titles in the run-up to the election.
And of course there's the mysterious visit to Downing Street by Rupert Murdoch, according to Channel Four's Gary Gibbon on his blog.
Murdoch has another ace up his sleeve: Sky. It's entirely feasible that The Times subscription could be bundled along with Sky Broadband, serving 2 and a half aims.
Firstly bolstering the readership, as any journalist ultimately wants to be read by a wide audience; and secondly adding unique value to the Sky package.
And the half aim? Control. I see any such bundling, should it occur, as a small step away from neutral networks and towards a more tightly-controlled internet where, depending on how you connect to the internet, you can access certain "preferred services" for free, whilst paying to access others.
True, in its strictest sense such a simple step of offering a free subscription does not impinge on the principles of a neutral network with low barriers to entry for new innovative services. That's why I flagged it as "half" an aim.
But I'm uncomfortable with the fact that media companies, not traditional telecommunications companies, rushed to take control of the pipes, and I don't like the noises they've made since seizing them.