So every time i watch HULU Murdock gets paid.

This will be a complete failure by Murdock, just as it has been for the record labels. The cat is out of the box!

There is simply too much free content out there already. This had to be a federated decision by the media provideers back in the 90′s, and it wasn’t. Not that that would even stop the free flow of content. I disagree on the quality issue; quality of what? Were are not talking novel writing here or great literature. You have two things – editorial and factual news.

Editorial is just that opinion. Yes, some is expressed more elegantly than others, but that’s not to say people look to NY Post writers as these great intellectual minds they are looking for leadership form. Blogs on the web and commentary against published articles are freely available all over the place.

Regarding factual news, you have to look no further than the Huffington’s Post coverage of the unrest in Iran, and how fast news of celebrities, accidents, etc. flows over Tweeter.

Bottom line, a pay for content strategy can still work for specialty magazines with true unique focus and expertise, but editorial and news, typically the mainstay of newspaper, will continue to be a failing model with pay-for-content. Newscorp would be much better offer leveraging their existing readership to provide free online content and sell advertising – typically the core review stream of newspapers historically anyway. Their challenge is not how to derive review from online content, but how to drive their offline readership to their online site so they have a unique base of online subscribed to sell advertising into.