Seriously, with every statement like this the industry makes the more they expose their complete failure at basic web concepts, and reveal the reason for their failures to survive in the online world. There is no reason these guys shouldn’t have been the search engines and have the online world completely in their hands, no reason except utter and complete idiocy. Yeah, that sounds harsh, but I firmly believe without a shadow of a doubt that these guys have less comprehension of the modern world around them than most high school age students. They should be embarrassed to call themselves executives and their employees should fear every day for their future.

If being more tolerant of the bootleg streams than sites like Veoh, Imeem or Megavideo is to drive traffic to MySpace, in light of the likely ~$100m in lost ad revenue from Google due to the drop in MySpace traffic – why allow the raw .flv files to stream directly off the servers? With no point of contact back to MySpace?

Most likely the people who can make strategic decisions at Newscorp are too many levels above the people doing the work on the ground, and they don’t even realize that they are shooting their own joint venture in the foot.
.-= BruceMcF´s last blog ..Sunday Train: Rescuing the Innocent Amtrak Numbers from SubsidyScope =-.

I certainly won’t be paying for online news articles – if i want to pay for a paper, I’ll go down to the shop and buy one and if I were an advertiser, I would be a little annoyed/worried right now.
.-= Luci´s last blog ..SEO Video Tutorial – Google Analytics Intelligence #24 =-.

Paid content is going to be the future of the Internet, there is just too much low quality free content, this will make people willing to pay for high quality reliable content. (Not that most of the rubbish that comes from NewsCorp could be called quality or reliable)

Also, you do not need to have huge numbers of paid subscribers to be profitable.

This will be bad news for Google who make their living leeching off other peoples free content, although I think they are safe for a while yet.

Sure there are a few sources of original quality news remaining – in English, The BBC, The New York Times and The Economist come to mind. But even the quality sources of news are multiple – and to the extent one of them remains “free” (ad or non-profit foundation supported), there won’t be sufficient scarcity to support the paid content model on the web. That is just plain economics.

Murdoch does now own the Wall Street Journal, one of the pioneers of paid content on the web – yet financial news is, and will remain, a niche. In some areas, local news could possibly be funded by a paid model but even there, is the quality sufficient to drive demand? I doubt it.

In Italy, one publisher has suggested a tax on Internet connections to fund news sources. While that does seem to be an easy solution for publishers, it unfairly penalizes the vast number of people who aren’t interested in subsidizing the vast numbers of dubious “quality” news sources out there, Murdoch’s own US Fox “News” topping my list.
.-= Sean Carlos´s last blog ..Yahoo Web Analytics (ex IndexTools) soon in no man’s land? =-.

Advertising revenue is News Corps biggest revenue stream by reducing access to your Sites will reduce revenues.

Signed Carl Barron Chairman of agpcuk

I never saw a google employe going to irak to write an article/video about the war.