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eyes micro-payments News Corp. paper promises tweaks to the paid content model May 11, 2009 See an article you want to read on WSJ.com but don’t want to spend $100 for a year's subscription to the online edition of The Wall Street Journal? Soon you’ll be able to cherry-pick the paper’s online content, paying a small fee for individual articles. The Journal will introduce a micro-payment system for its site as soon as this fall, according to The Financial Times. It will also introduce special pricing for modified subscriptions as News Corp. widens the Journal’s local focus in cities such as San Francisco and Detroit, where hometown papers are struggling, in order to attract new subscribers. The move comes at a time when the newspaper industry as a whole is reexamining its commitment to free online content, as print advertising revenue sinks and circulation plummets. And newspapers aren’t the only media companies eyeing a paid content model. There’s been speculation for months that cable companies, too, are readying plans that would require viewers to have cable subscriptions before they can watch certain online content, ensuring that viewers can’t get something for free online that they’d be charged for offline. Comcast recently announced it is making its standard and premium cable content available on-demand via Fancast.com by year’s end. The wisdom of charging for content online has long been questioned, in large part because so much of it is available for free elsewhere. But News Corp.’s move and Comcast’s actions raises an interesting question: What might happen if all the major cotent providers start charging for content? Could that, in fact, challenge the longstanding free internet model? Perhaps, only this time readers may be ready to buy into it. A new study conducted in the U.S. and Europe by PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that respondents would be willing to pay 97 percent of the price of a newspaper for unique online business content. They would pay 77 percent of a newspaper price for original sports content. The media industry has struggled to institute the paid model in the past. AOL long ago walled off its content, which at one point included Time Inc. magazines, only to tear down the wall when its subscriptions stopped booming. The New York Times two years ago abandoned a paid model for some online content, though it has said it may explore the option again. And News Corp.’s The Australian newspaper has said it will institute some type of paid content model in the coming months.
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