Happy days for MX Telecom’s Mark Fitzgerald, who sold the company to Amdocs this week for $104million in cash. Industry consolidation in action there I think you’ll agree. Whether the giant US company will ‘spoil’ good ole MX remains to be seen, but the two businesses are a pretty good fit: MX brings a good deal of European mobile payments experience to Amdoc’s OpenMarket, a nascent mobile payments hub in the US. In return, MX finally gets the traction in the US market that it has been striving for over the past few months. As I say, nice fit.
Not such happy days, however, for news consumers as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. announces today that it will start charging for online news content from June – just in time for WORLD TELEMEDIA MALTA (9-11 June). So he finally did it. Users will be charged £1 for a days access and £2 for a week’s worth of right of centre, Murdoch-friendly scribing. The company also hinted that leading tabloid titles the News of the World and The Sun would follow suit.
The company is buoyed by the fact that online ABC figures are up to 1.22million daily browsers. Watch this plummet when the charges come in to force. Whether the decline will be long term remains to be seen. While there are obvious advantages for the telemedia sector around charging for online and mobile media content, experts are still divided over whether consumers will actually pay for the news online in this way.
Some believe that someone with Murdoch’s business nous won’t have done this without knowing it will work, while others – the younger end of the media watching media, it has to be said – insist that old man Rupert just doesn’t get the web and is trying to impose old print business models on the new world order. I guess we will, from about August onwards, find out who was right.
ISSUES AROUND CHARGING FOR ONLINE MEDIA CONTENT WILL BE EXTENSIVELY COVERED AT WORLD TELEMEDIA MATLA 9-11 JUNE, CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
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