I'm with Murdoch on this one. Have you seen what's happening to television at Hulu, and textbooks with the Kindle? Newspapers going behind a paywall is only too obvious. The current business model of "give it away but put up some display ads" is simply not sustainable. It only exists because a better business model has not yet presented itself. Textbook companies aren't going the way of many newspapers. They will only sell copies of their books that are tied to specific DRM models such as the Kindle provides, and they will artificially jack the prices up just as they have done with paper textbooks. The newspaper companies that haven't failed are likely to follow suit.
Probably we are just seeing the beginning of the micropayment concept. I kind of prefer it as I really, really hate looking at advertisements. Hulu is nice enough to tell me how many seconds the advertisement lasts. I surf the web with mute on for exactly that long.. Kind of a mishmash of ideas but they seem quite related. We are definitely going through a shift from free to paid content online. Wikipedia is ever more important.. On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 11:05 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonav...@gmail.com > wrote: > David Gerard wrote: > > > http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/07/rupert-murdoch-charging-websites > > > > Time for Wikinews to get recruiting ... > > > > > > > > Haha, Murdoch predicts the death of internet, newsreel at eleven. > > > Yours, > > Jussi-Ville Heiskanen > > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
