Rupert Murdoch has indicated that News Ltd will announce in the next few weeks how it intends to charge users for its online offering. While it now seems that a wider industry move towards charging for online content is inevitable, the success of this move hinges on whether people are willing to pay for online news they’ve previously accessed for free, or whether they’ll simply stop reading those publications which choose to charge.

So will people pay? As one might expect, Richard Freudenstein, chief executive of News Corp’s online arm News Digital Media, said he believed they would.

"(People) are happy to look at other ways to get information as well but when the crunch comes they want trusted news brands. And we have incredibly strong brands," he said.

"Almost 19 million papers are sold every week in Australia. If we present a compelling proposition to people, they will pay."

However the counter view also has logic, as articulated by Alan Kohler, co-founder of Business Spectator and SmartCompany, in an article last month. He believes that “for a newspaper, the value proposition – the thing that the readers are actually paying for – is the delivery, not the content.” He draws the conclusion that as online media isn’t ‘delivered’ in the traditional sense, paid content online needs to offer readers something unique and exclusive in order to be successful.

This position is reflected in the business model for First Digital, which owns Business Spectator, Crikey, SmartCompany and Eureka Report. These sites include both free and paid components, while the paid components, such as Eureka Report offer detailed, exclusive information for a targeted audience – providing that ‘value proposition’.

This position regarding exclusivity is supported by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WANNP). WANNP has recently published a report entitled New Revenue Models for Newspaper Companies which explores paid content among a range of options for newspapers. WANNP says "the key to charging… is that the content being charged for is unique, and cannot be accessed anywhere else, or if it can be, time is of the essence, as with financial news."

The most prominent debate about online content is the ongoing argument between Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC and Rupert Murdoch. Mark has described Rupert as an ‘emperor unaware that the world has changed.’ He claims that News Ltd’s move towards paid content is “a classic play of old empire, of empire in decline, believing that because you once controlled the world you can continue to do so, because once you set the rules, you can do so again.” Time will tell.

Interestingly, The New York Times charged for online content between 2005 and 2007, reverting to a free website, after admitting that projections for growth of the subscriber database were low in comparison to the growth of online advertising.  However The New York Times will again charge online readers from January 2011, this time announcing that frequent users will be charged. They point to falling advertising revenue over the past two years as one of the main reasons behind this decision.

There is no doubt that more outlets will make the move towards charging for their online content in the coming months. While some readers will be prepared to pay for online content, a large number will switch to any remaining free online publications or continue to get their news from traditional sources, such as free to air television or their websites, (free) radio and (paid for) newspapers. The media landscape is changing once again, and we watch News Ltd’s experiment with interest as it will prove one way or another how much value consumers attach to the delivery of their news.