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Mr. Murdoch should consult his referes log before executing on that strategy.

• pbhjpbhj 17y ago
  Perhaps he has, in fact almost certainly. (btw sp: referers(sic), yes it's not referrers!) Some fictitious scenarios: 1) they give away the news, only ad revenue from 100% of current readers who are mostly too cheap to pay (that's me!) 2) they sell the news to 5% of current readers, targetted ad revenue doesn't alter as these readers buy stuff, and buy stuff online to boot I'm going to go ahead and assume that most people come to the prestige newspapers The Times (of London) by a search for the papers name - now they're not going to delist themselves just stop putting all their stories up online. Indeed I'd expect them to have lead summaries still in SERPs. If most paying customers and most ad following customers come via the reputation and not specific stories then it seems there's little to lose. Even if it works but not as well as liked it's only going to work better if more news centres follow suit - the less freely available well written news online the greater the value of pay news (and the less they'll need to charge). Personally I think Murdoch can probably pull this off for some of his larger news providers - do I like it, not one bit.