back to article Murdoch's paywall: The end of the suicide era?

News International is offering a glimpse of its revamped Times and Sunday Times newspaper sites, before they disappear behind a paywall in four weeks' time. Murdoch's move has been greeted with a lot of angst from people who never pay for anything - the Kumbaya crowd - but also criticism from rivals who, hypocritically, secretly …

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      1. Richard 120
        Headmaster

        Oooh

        People downvoted you because you pointed out a spelling error. I'm curious as to whether that's a personality thing (I think the upvoting/downvoting thing is turning the Register into a bit of a popularity contest)

        Or alternatively it could be because he did spell it with just one U, it just happened to be in the wrong place with another couple of letters in there instead.

        And I guess you are stuck with the vulture icon instead of the more correct spelling nazi icon

        1. Graham Marsden
          FAIL

          No...

          People downvoted him because he pointed out a spelling error and ignored the rest of the comment.

          In any case, pedanting spelling errors is the sort of thing that you expect from commentards, not El Reg journotards.

  1. James Pickett

    More..

    money for Old Rupe. From people who are daft enough to buy iPads, anyway.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    I only have the choice of a Murdoch paper in this town...

    ...so I read the bits I'm interested 'for free' but give a cafe owner $3 for a coffee. That's a lot of people sharing a few newspapers and 'minimizing' Murdoch's direct sales. Oddly enough I have been getting his weekend papers home delivered for free because whoever the moron local distributor is has been throwing them over the fence for a few years now without me even asking them too. Great. If they try to pick me up on it, I'll %^&ing sue them for littering my front yard. And yes this rich complex business model all predates the 'net. Speaking of simpletons, why wouldn't someone just subscribe, then share the logon with oh, about 20 different friends ? iPad or not you ought to be able to browse and login and I'll bet the software won't keep track of how many times you're logged in on different devices.

  3. Fluffykins Silver badge

    Didn't New Scientist try this, or summat like it?

    Seems to have reverted to a free read, but register (=pay? Didn't bother to find out) to comment

  4. Grumpytom
    Megaphone

    3.6bn or 50 mil

    So he lost 3.6bn and now he wants inexpensive electronic publishing to plug the hole left by very outmoded newsprint, news-press machines, distribution systems (profit taken along the chain) and then leaving the reader with a huge disposal problem. "News" papers are so over, this is a death throw. His last revolution digital input was on the leading curve, now he has lost sight - reminds me of Geffen & the music industry trying to keep it as it was.

    He could run a fantastic electronic system for 50 mil, no prob and the fees would be rational or with good ads nil, even having some money over for comment journalists as seen today on The Times.

    Subsidising outmoded methods has never worked, and it never will.

  5. strum

    How much news?

    One factor to be considered is - how much real news is there? Take out 'The government is thought to be considering...' and 'Reactions to last week's events continue...' and 'Columnist ekes 2000 words out of idle speculation' - and there won't be an awful lot left.

    Wash out the spin, and you could get a day's real news on a single page of A4.

    On newsprint, you might not notice this. But I reckon the sparsity of real news becomes much more obvious on the web - especially when it's so easy to scan several sites, and spot the same press releases being regurgitated.

    There may be moments - perhaps once a year - when you really need to know a given fact. And it may be acceptable to pay a quid to get it - but only if you can't get it elsewhere, for free. That doesn't sound like a business plan to me.

  6. Semaj
    Pirate

    a

    People will always write news and people will always read news. Just like people will always make and watch movies and make or listen to music. If the big businesses who are currently in charge of these things die out because of piracy and whatnot then the worst that will happen is that we'll have to do without those luxuries for a little while and put up with slightly lower quality.

  7. chr0m4t1c

    Maybe I missed something.

    But I can't see any evidence that they're going to drop adverts altogether, in fact the front page has a link for potential advertisers to use.

    So they don't need to replace all of the revenue from ads, in fact they may not need to replace any of it because the ad people might (probably will) get access to a bunch of demographic data that they wouldn't get from the normal paper - and they may place a high value on that.

    I also see they appear to have their pricing wrong, surely the accepted norm is to charge twice as much for the electronic version?

    And lastly, if they are targeting this at the iPad owners then someone needs to point out that they have way too much Flash on their new site.

    Actually, this is a prime example of what is wrong with web+flash generally; all of the flash applets on the front page are just showing pictures, which is something that can be easily achieved by, say, using a picture. I expect it's to make it difficult for someone to steal the picture, although it doesn't make it impossible and it does spoil the experience for those of us with blocking software.

  8. cs94njw
    FAIL

    Sky Sports

    Hang on. Isn't this the same Murdoch that makes you pay a fat fee to watch Sky Sports, and then STILL bombards you with adverts?

    When I saw that, I choked and laughed at the same time.

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