Nichepapers

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. recently announced that they will be charging for online content. Much has been said about how the monetization of news content is not possible as there are plenty of websites which will provide users the same information. One of the blogs at HBR had an excellent strategy on how to monetize the traditional newspaper. I will try to find a link to that blog. If News Corp. is the only site that will go ahead and charge users for accessing their online content, it is going to be a big failure - considering Myspace isn't doing well, and if Newscorp takes further hit in their profits, I am not sure where Rupert Murdoch is going to stand in future.

It is going to be interesting to see how newspapers evolve in the next couple of years. Newspaper is a batch processing job whereas www is full of real time news. With twitter and facebook, people don't have to wait till the next day to read the news. So, if there is a monetization model present, it shouldn't be of delivering of news but perhaps a some sort of discussion/topic that relates to the news and presents alternative viewpoints. A news in itself isn't going to add much value anymore. This is where Nichepapers are going to come in place. Sites like Techcrunch, Techmeme, Huffington Posts have done exceedingly well, and will continue to do so. They provide a domain specific news and have captured their niche audience who want to learn about their specific content.

NewsCorp: NWSA, Market Cap: 29.9B.