“News Corp in June closed its free Times of London website. The Times, the Sunday Times and Britain’s best-selling Sunday tabloid the News of the World — also owned by News Corp — are now available online only to paying subscribers,” Prodhan reports. “News Corp’s British newspaper arm News International said this month the titles had lost up to 90 percent of their online readership and now had 105,000 paying customers, including those who had bought the iPad and Amazon Kindle apps.”
Prodhan reports, “Rupert Murdoch, News Corp’s chief executive and James’s father, has called the iPad a game-changer for news media, and many in the industry agree, thanks to the iPad’s large screen, high resolution and capacity for interactive features.”
“James Murdoch welcomed the opportunity to sell through Apple’s iTunes online store, despite the fact that Apple takes 30 percent of the publisher’s revenue,” Prodhan reports. “‘We go to the iTunes store because it’s frictionless. They charge a percentage but the guy on the newstand and the newsagent charge a percentage, and they don’t even merchandise it properly,’ he told the Monaco Media Forum. ‘The problem with the apps is that they are much more directly cannibalistic of the print products than the website,’ he said. ‘People interact with it much more like they do with the traditional product.'”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
