Nun wird’s ernst: Rupert Murdoch fährt die Paywalls hoch, und zwar rund um die neuen Websites von «Times» und «Sunday Times» herum:
- «All but the homepage will be invisible to those refusing to pay £1 a day – and that includes Google’s spiders»,
heisst es dazu im «Tech Blog» von «FT.com».
BBC-Tech-Journalist Rory Cellan-Jones schreibt auf seinem Blog «dot.Rory» dazu:
- «This is more than just an experiment in whether people will pay for news, it’s a strike against the prevailing philosophy of online journalism, which says that the most important thing is to make your material shareable to the widest possible audience. [...] Go to a site like Twitter and you will see an orgy of self-promotion from journalists tweeting links to their latest stories or blog posts. Over the weekend, the social network was alive with discussion of a piece about Lady Gaga by the Times’ extremely entertaining feature writer Caitlin Moran. During the election, the Times’ chief leader writer and political columnist Daniel Finkelstein reached a far wider audience via social networks and Google searches than actually paid to read him in the paper.
Now all that will stop. Google searches will no longer turn up Times stories, and links posted on social networks will only take you to the papers’ sign-in page. News International has opted for the most extreme form of paywall – others let search engines crawl their sites, or offer non-paying visitors a few free articles to entice them in.»
Ganz anders will offenbar die «New York Times» vorgehen, wie eine Sprecherin des Verlags gegenüber Peter Kafka von «All Things Digital» ausführte:
- «Once the pay model is implemented next year, the majority of our readers will be unaffected when using the site and will continue to have the same experience they have always had. Readers will only be prompted to pay after reaching a certain reading limit. The pay model will be designed so readers that are referred from third party sites such as blogs will be able to access that content without hitting their limit, enabling NYTimes.com to continue being a part of the open web. We have not yet set the reading limit and we will communicate that once we have made the decision.»