It has been no secret that the internet culture of sharing information and news content has been an increasingly large thorn in the side of large news corporations. However, media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, feels he has the answer and can reverse slumping revenue by charging for news content.Strangely enough the only reason I heard about this story was because I was following the Guardian on Twitter. I then did a Google News search to find more about the story. I cannot think of a better way of illustrating the problem that large old media corporations are facing at this moment in time.
In a video interview on YouTube, the media mogul Murdoch discusses how 'everyone has been asleep' and how the content should never have been free in the first place. He then went on to accuse the likes of Google and Microsoft of stealing his stories. To me it seems like the last frenzied scrap by a dying autocratic media business model. He seems to place little or no value on the fact that such companies are directing potential customers to his news websites. They simply act as indexers or portals that lead users to the content and are not responsible for the content itself. It is centralised media corporations which have been asleep not everyone else.
If they were awake they would have realised that there is a fundamental shift taking place in the media landscape. It is now evolving to a more distributed decentralised two-way model of sharing news and information. It is not a case that one corporation can take charge and own the stories. The story is no longer static content at a point in time but a dynamically evolving entity of which we are all part of and can all have our voices heard. The value of this human connectedness and sharing goes way beyond profit margins of large old autocratic media corporations. However, a new business model will soon evolve out the ashes of the old media world. I doubt it will be what we expect. The internet is funny like that.
What is more is that people have already had a taste of this new evolution and will not give it up. At the end of the day corporations like Murdoch's provide a service for customers and in order to do this effectively they need listen to what customers want and value instead of being 'asleep'. It is no longer the case that they will have exclusivity to impose a rigid view of the world on its audiences. I am not sure those audiences are not even theirs any more - they are more mine and yours. This audience exclusivity is and will continue to be challenged by the new distributed online information sharing model.
By next year it may be difficult to find Murdoch news content in Google or Bing as he attempts to charge users for content. I am keen to see how this works out and if it is viable business model as all this may achieve is to further reduce his influence, audience and ultimately revenue.
We have seen it throughout history that empires rise and fall mostly due to inflexibilty and being unadaptable to changing environmental conditions.
I guess what I am trying to say can be summed up in one sentence or status update. Click here...
