Tablets are taking over for Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch has announced that he has the right idea by charging subscriptions for online viewing of The Times of London, and that The Australian will be following suit on the back of the iPad revolution.

Murdoch has estimated Apple will sell around 15 million iPads this year, and over 40 million by 2012, giving him the ‘perfect platform’ to launch his new ‘freemium’ model. The 'freemium' model is similar to that used by The Wall Street Journal, where users can only access premium content by subscribing to the newspaper. In the first month The Australian was available as an iPad app it saw 8500 people paying $4.99 each to subscribe, and with news that people are spending twice as long on the iPad app then on The Australian website, this number will be sure to rise.


Murdoch’s News Corporation has already had an overwhelming audience on The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, and The Australian iPad apps.

While I’m still a believer that news should be free, I guess I will have to contend with free to air television instead. Murdoch believes that this is the way to go in order to recover the investment they have made in journalism, which makes perfect sense. Why should we get to access the news for free, employees have to get paid somehow.

Source: Sinclair, L 2010, 'Murdoch takes a page out of The Times' net subscription,' The Australian, 4 August.
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