TecTrends Monitor

A column by Richard Morgan in The Deal reports on a recent Australian TV interview in which Rupert Murdoch railed against free online content, and threatened to delist all his newspapers’ content from Google.

This was throwing red meat to blogs and forums, and the uproar was as predictable as it was entertaining. Rupert Murdoch is not a beloved figure, best known for hard edged politics and less than highbrow journalism. If the New York Post vanishes from my Google results I won’t miss it.

In contrast, unless you are a publisher or a rival search engine, what’s not to like about Google? We use it constantly, it gives pretty good results, and we don’t pay a dime. Even the ads are unobstrusive.

All the same, of course, Murdoch has a point. Whatever you think of his content, quality content is expensive to produce. And as a content creator myself I’d certainly like to be paid for mine.

But Murdoch also says ‘we shouldn’t have had it free all this time,’ and here he is wrong. If online news content weren’t free, for the most part we wouldn’t be paying for it – we simply wouldn’t be reading it. (There are exceptions for specialized content, as from Murdoch’s own Wall St. Journal.)

I read online news much the same way I read print magazines at my local library branch or Barnes & Noble. I’ll grab half a dozen magazines and thumb through them, reading any interesting articles, then toss the issue aside.

Online, it’s a series of Firefox tabs I work my way through, but I’m no more loyal to the sources I’m reading online than to the stack on a library table. My ‘loyalty’ goes to the library, or to Firefox, not the publications they make available.

When Salon, Slate, and the NYT tried to put content behind a subscription wall I simply went elsewhere. So did most of their readers, which is why the paywalls were abandoned.

But I still subscribe to a dead tree paper that thumps onto my driveway every morning, just as I buy books even though I could check them out of the library.

For this reason the uproar of publishers over Google Books also strikes me as wrongheaded. I use Google Books regularly. But it doesn’t replace book buying, it replaces the library/bookstore easy chair (and Interlibrary Loan for books not readily available). The excisions forced by publishers are as needless as they are annoying.

Print, I suspect, is far from dead. As the column linked above notes, 48 percent of American adults still read a print paper, and subscriptions are holding up surprisingly well.

This does not solve the problem of online content. Perhaps advertisers will realize that there is more to ads than click-throughs. (They pay plenty for TV ads, and no one clicks on those.)

In the longer term, I suspect we will evolve toward channels of content.

For books, a spectrum running from Google Books to the Kindle to hardbacks. For periodicals, perhaps, a spectrum from online to ’streaming’ print to the dead tree local paper.

Information does not want to be free, it wants to be accessible. And that is what the market, technology, and culture are gradually working their way through.

Update: An article I just came across in The Economist reports a study confirming what I called the lack of loyalty in online reading. But they gave it a better name, primly – or perhaps tartly – referring to British online news readers as  ‘shamelessly promiscuous‘ about where they go for content.