Murdoch's paywall: playtime is over • public communication

8 Notes

Murdoch’s paywall: playtime is over

I don’t know if backlash has an antonym - frontlash, maybe - but Rupert Murdoch’s erection of paywalls around the Times and Sunday Times websites seems to have attracted one. The original announcement last year, the erection of the paywall, the recent, eye-watering traffic data, has been accompanied by a steady, vuvuzela chorus of derision, disbelief and disapproval. Now, at last, some more well-founded commentary is emerging.

I was never convinced by the naysayers who thought the paywall was commercial suicide, having not only observed Murdoch’s activities for the past 25 years, but also having worked at BSkyB, the UK digital TV arm of the empire. We know that Murdoch is not afraid to take risks that rivals would not or could not - look at Fox, look at TV Guide, look at Wapping, look at BSkyB. We know that he has deep pockets. Crucially, we know that he has the patience to play the long game. So the fact that the pay wall would choke off traffic in the short and possibly medium term was never news, least of all to Murdoch himself.

Similarly, those who wail about the consequences of the paywall experiment for journalism are missing the point. Quite apart from the fact that they seem blind to the perverse impact of corporate ownership and advertising on journalism over the past century, such a position ignores the fact, well understood by Murdoch himself, that journalism is not his product. Readerships are his product, just as they are for any newspaper dependent on advertising as a revenue stream.Dallas Smythe taught us this simple lesson back in 1977, with his ‘blindspot’ model.

Newspapers manufacture readerships which they then package and sell to advertisers. In this model, the readership performs labour for the newspaper owner by attending to the editorial and - crucially - advertising - content of the paper. What has occurred in the 15 years or so since newspaper websites started attracting large readerships is that newspapers have thus sprouted a way for readers to gain all the benefits of such content without performing that labour. They are reading the content on the website, where advertising rates are much lower than in the printed title. One of the reasons why rates remain so much lower is because such readers are deemed by advertisers to be more casual than readers who have paid for the printed title. Quite simply, readers aren’t working as hard as they used to.

Sticking with the idea of reader labour, imagine the newspaper as a factory for the production of audiences. Think of the production line as the area where the readership is produced. People come into the factory, where they package themselves into readerships that can be sold on to advertisers.

We may think of the newspaper website as a playroom in the factory, full of beanbags, food and drink provided at the owner’s expense. Increasing numbers of reader-workers have started to drift away from the production lines to hang out in this space. Although they were always entitled to these benefits, they have realised that they can enjoy them without having to put in the time on the production lines.

Until now, there has been an ambiguous relationship between the production line and the playroom. The playroom was thought of as a necessary addition to the production line, as it made the whole factory more attractive, but it was seen as just that - an addition. With the introduction of the paywall, Murdoch is turning the cost centre of the playroom into a profit centre, like the production line. He is restricting access to it to paying members, like a gym or a club. Just as he took top-flight English football 18 years ago and turned it from a quasi-public good into a private one, so he is doing with newspaper websites. Just as he bet that he could eventually overcome the howls of dismay from viewers and turn televised Premier League football into a multi-billion pound business, so he now bets that he can, over time, turn his news sites/playrooms into profitable businesses.

But, as Peter Robins hints, it will be unrecognisable from the add-on playroom model of news sites with which we are familiar. It may also, one day, become the primary revenue stream and outgrow the printed newspaper business which spawned it. But we are not there yet.