No More Free Access to Press Resources on the iPhone

Free access to press resources in the Internet will soon be over. This is because of media mogul Rupert Murdoch who has just announced his company News Corp. would start charging Internet users for access to web issues of press titles. Including the ones available on the iPhone.

It will concern popular and opinion-making titles such as "The New York Post", "The Wall Street Journal" or "The Times", along with the biggest tabloid in the world "The Sun". This is no good news to all 360 thousand iPhone users who have so far downloaded a WSJ app from the App Store that grants access to "The Wall Street Journal's" premium Internet content for free. They will be forced to either remove the WSJ app from iPhone springboard or pay Mr Murdoch a subscription fee. They will most likely be faced with this choice together with the debut of the third version of iPhone OS that will allow for micropayments inside apps.

According to Mr Murdoch, free Internet content is a mistake: "It is obvious to press publishers that the present model of Internet content access is not working". However, it is worth to remember yesterday News Corp. reported a 47% decline in its profits last quarter to USD 775 million.

Despite disastrous financial data presented by Mr Murdoch's conglomerate and a natural impulse to seek an easy and fast way to fix the situation, his decision seems to be… wrong. At times when an imminent end to printed press is more than apparent, monitoring media reprints everything and everyone and blogging/microblogging is developing extremely fast, Mr Murdoch sentences himself to slow transformation into dinosaur. Seemingly still huge and powerful but more and more clumsy and slowly becoming extinct.

It is commonly known that printed press does not live off sales to readers but advertisements. However, the former would not exist without the latter and the prices of ads depend on range and affinity for a given target. Proceeds from the sales of press cover the costs in best cases. You earn on how many and for how much you can sell ads. It is quite strange that the biggest player on the press market deliberately lowers its range and consequently the prices of advertisements. Internet users are spoiled because they have everything for free and probably only a small percentage of them will invest in Mr Murdoch's subscription. Consequently 360 thousand WSJ downloads on the iPhone will soon melt into some 3 thousand active apps.