Charging for content: haven’t we been here before?

The concept of charging for content online is one of the hot topics at the moment, especially in the media world.  The Times and The Sunday Times have just launched two sites – one re-designed version for The Times and a brand new site for The Sunday Times – for which they will start charging later this month.

Charging for access to news is not a fresh idea – as pointed out in an article on the BBC’s website, Mr Murdoch charged for the Times Education Supplement in 1997, after which the dotcom boom and venture capitalists pushed free content and ever since then people have been used to free content.

I’ve read that “most of the content on the internet is free.”  But a huge majority of the web’s content is pornographic – and paid-for – material.  Couple that with the FT charging for access to its news, the Wall Street Journal commanding a subscription fee and having to pay for parts of the New York Times, and it’s evident that paying for content online is rife.

The step between free and paid-for is registration, and logging into a web site is something which has become the norm across the entire web.  EBay, Amazon, IMDB.com, banking, forums – they all require some level of registration and logon.  Having people submit that sort of information so that recommendations can be tailored to their interests is what has made a success out of myriad sites.

Obviously, the traffic levels of The Times’ web site will fall dramatically, but if a small minority of people are prepared to pay, it won’t matter.  At the moment, the sites are free (albeit behind a registration/login page) and I have to say that they look and feel a lot better than the old Times Online site (which will be switched off at some point, I imagine).

It does beg the question, however: why not just get people to log into the new Times/Sunday Times sites, the registration of which requires a small amount of information to be submitted, then use the data to be able to target advertising at people?  I know all about conceptual and behavioural targeting, where advertising is tailored to the destination page’s content or to the previous surfing behaviour of the user respectively, but surely this would be more accurate.  If an advertiser actually knows that the person looking at the page is a 30-year-old male who is interested in photography and nightclubbing, instead of relying on cookied information which may or may not relate to the user, then they can serve advertising to them which is absolutely on-the-button pertinent.

Time will tell whether Mr Murdoch has made a move of genius or a calamitous error in charging for news.  And although the other newspaper publishers are saying that they’d never charge for their web sites, I’m sure that deep down, they want him to succeed for the sake of the industry’s survival.