Closing the media gap: The value of online content

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Ever since Rupert Murdoch suggested last summer that some of the papers owned by his News International would begin charging for online content, there’s been plenty of speculation about whether he’d actually do it, and – more importantly – whether it would work if implemented. This week Murdoch announced that beginning in June, a paywall would be put in place on the online versions of the Times and Sunday Times. Users will either pay £1 per day, or £2 for a week’s subscription. Will it work?

Murdoch seems to think it will. Or at least, he’s simply just sick of not making money in every possible way he can. The Australian media magnate is notoriously un-savvy when it comes to the Internet; he has only just begun to use email, and apparently has never used Google. But what Murdoch has done is build a media empire, so perhaps he’s on to something.

The going assumption is that the Times and Sunday Times will lose readers – initially. But News International’s chief executive, Rebekah Brooks defended the paywall decision by stating that, “We are proud of our journalism and are unashamed to say that we believe it has value.” That’s kind of an interesting thing to say. What does she mean?

One of the generally accepted aspects of the internet is that it’s a great democratic tool – that, when available, it acts as a global leveler, rearranging us all onto an equal plane. With this in mind, it seems that Murdoch is keen on introducing a consumer-based hierarchy into a medium that has built its success on the opposite.

But the interesting thing about the internet is that while its success has been based around a literal free-flow of content, it has relied just as much on the established consumer hierarchy of the real world. It’s no secret that, generally speaking, in our society we place cultural value on things that cost money. We place even more value on having or experiencing something that ought to cost money, but that we got for free.

What we value about online information is that there’s a lot of it, and it’s all relatively easy to access. Both of these attributes appeal to our inner consumer more than they do our altruism, and understanding this, we take advantage.  In other words, we like the fact that it’s a killer deal more than the possibility that ubiquitous free information might educate the masses.

Which is why the success or failure of Murdoch’s decision is so interesting. So far, the internet has existed in a bizarre consumer paradise, and it’s not so much that people are upset that information won’t be available anymore, but that the real world system is intruding.

But why is this a problem for us?

The problem is that in the real world, once you purchase a medium, you are free to browse it at your leisure. If you buy a newspaper, all the content within it is included. Same thing goes for a cable TV package. At the moment, this is also the case with the internet. We’re used to being sold the medium, not the content; you buy a newspaper, not a pile of articles. In other words, we’re accustomed to an exterior structure of content selection that must be adhered to by the user once they have access to the medium. Obviously, that’s not the case online, but we still approach it that way.

The internet is not the first medium built upon another (the novel was built upon text, for example) but it is perhaps the first medium built upon all the other media that we used to pay for. That all-encompassing nature eliminates our previous perceptions of information: all of a sudden, it’s not ‘news’ or ‘video’, it’s all just ‘the internet’. What Murdoch is trying to do (perhaps unintentionally) is destroy that mental disconnect, and ask us to pay for media within a medium. His success would mean that not only has the old exterrior economic system prevailed over its effective alter-ego, but that we may have to start thinking about the value of all media content in a much different way than before.