Newspapers Online: Is it Good for Newspaper Business?

These days it become very easy due to the internet to get news online and that too without any cost or without buying any newspapers. If one newspaper starts charging, readers may migrate to those that remain free. If, on the other hand, a lot of papers begin charging at the same time, readers might be jostled into paying.

I was reading an article in The Economist, in which Oliver & Ohlbaum, a media consultancy conducted a study. They began by asking people what newspaper they tended to read and whether or not they subscribed to it (most get their papers from shops). Then they quizzed readers about where they went for news on the internet. The results were consistent: when it comes to online news, Britons are shamelessly promiscuous.

The online strategies for most of the media companies is that people will buy a favourite newspaper and then go to its website for breaking news and extras such as blogs. But fans of the Daily Telegraph, for example, the most popular quality daily paper, got just 8% of their online news from its website (see chart). They spent twice as much time visiting the BBC’s news website and more than twice as much reading other quality papers. Most surprising, they were more likely to read tabloid papers like the Sun and the Daily Mirror online than their own favourite paper. Others were no more loyal. Sun readers, for example, visited the websites of quality newspapers about as often as they did those of tabloids, including their own Sun.


Another surprise is how little readers rely on online news aggregators such as Yahoo! News and Google News. The latter in particular has been accused of stealing newspapers’ content and undermining their attempts to charge for it. On December 1st Google offered to let publishers who want to charge for news restrict traffic to five articles per reader, per day.

The survey also contained devastating news for those publishers hoping to co-ordinate attempts to charge. When Guardian readers were asked whether they would pay £2 a month to read their favourite paper online, 26% said yes. But if all newspapers charged? The proportion prepared to pay for the Guardian might have been expected to rise. Instead it fell to 16%. This seems odd, until one considers readers’ promiscuity. Faced with having to spend rather a lot to keep snacking from a wide variety of news sources, they protested. The questions are hypothetical, and people may react differently when and if pay walls actually go up. But this will hardly encourage newspaper owners.

Getting news online for free; is somehow affecting the newspaper businesses and for which the the newspapers owners are looking for a solution to this problem.
Please share your views about this post.

Microsoft vs Goolgle- A war among Giants

The ongoing war among the top giants Microsoft and Google took a new turn when Microsoft opens a new front in its battle with google. Microsoft is looking to block Google, the search giant, from indexing their content and make it searchable only through "BING", the new search engine service from Microsoft. Bing is looking to gain market share from Google.

"Microsoft" the world largest software company may pay Time Warner, News Corporation and other media firms to block google from indexing their content and make it searchable only through "BING". Microsoft has discussed this with New Corp and the negociations are still going on. It is a sign not only of how far Microsoft is willing to go in order to turn Bing into a serious rival to Google, but also of how the entire internet could well evolve.

It should come as no surprise that News Corp would be the first to discuss such a deal. Rupert Murdoch, its boss, has long criticised Google for “stealing” his newspapers’ stories by pasting links to them on Google’s own site. He has also announced loudly and often that he wants to charge for more of the content that his firm puts online. What is more, he needs to renegotiate the deal that in 2006 gave Google the exclusive right to place search ads on MySpace, a social network owned by News Corp. Back then Google agreed to shell out $900m over three years for the privilege, although it may in the end pay less, as traffic on MySpace has not met the targets specified.

According to Hitwise, a market research firm, Google is unlikely to want to pay such a high price again, given that declining traffic and thus disappointing advertising revenues. Google also knows that Mr Murdoch will think twice before blocking the biggest source of traffic for his newspapers’ websites. More than a quarter of all visitors to the Wall Street Journal’s site, for instance, come from Google, which is in line with most other newspapers.



Microsoft, for its part, cannot afford to let Google rule the search business and, by extension, a big part of the online advertising that is expected pay for many services in the age of cloud computing. In recent years the firm has invested billions in its search capabilities. With Bing, it has at last come up with a plausible alternative, which works better than Google for some searches, such as comparing prices of consumer electronics or looking for cheap flights. To boost Bing’s market share, Microsoft in July agreed with Yahoo!, another online giant, to merge both firms’ search activities.

Since its launch in June, Bing’s market share has grown by two percentage points to nearly 10% of all searches in America, but Yahoo!’s has dropped by the same figure to 18%. Exclusive content deals may just be what Microsoft needs to reach a combined 30%, which some experts see as the minimum to make a dent in Google’s business. Microsoft appears ready to spend whatever is needed: up to 10% of the company’s overall operating income over the next five years, according to Steve Ballmer, the firm’s boss. This would, all things being equal, add up to some $11 billion.

Although, Microsoft's search engine BING has to go a long way to compete with the existing search Giant Google... Please feel free to post your valuable comments or add something to this post.