Over the past few years sales of mainstream publications have been dwindling and publishers have been forced to embrace the online medium. In recent days Rupert Murdoch of media behemoth NewsCorp has reveled his plans to "hide" his news content from Google and their search bots. Not only that, but he wants readers to pay for the news they consume. We explore points of arguing for and against paid content.

Free content - Tom Stone, NGO Editor

Everything good about the web is free or open-source. People have become accustomed to consuming media without paying a penny, as such the main problem media outlets face is that people have gotten used to free content. Free music, free video, free content, free everything - even the apps that companies have paid to develop are free, delivering free content to your mobile. No matter how big your organisation maybe, changing peoples' frame of mind will be more than an uphill struggle. Google - a name synonymous with the internet - has built its brand and a multi-billion dollar company on these values.

As a web evangelist, I believe Murdoch is stuck in the Dark Ages and has failed to learn lessons discovered by the music industry. Putting a barrier up against your loyal consumers will only portray your brand in an bad light. This quote shows he's been stuck in a bubble for a little too long:

"There are no news websites or blog websites anywhere in the world making any serious money, some may be breaking even or making a couple of million."

He then went on to say, "There's not enough advertising in the world to make all the websites profitable. We'd rather have fewer people coming to our websites but paying."

Phah.

If you deliver free content it can be a great way to be discovered; build a loyal following around your work, which will encourage others to follow you also. How does this apply to large media companies? Think how much more accessible media is now. We can consume media in transit, and literally everywhere else we go. Through your mobile, PC and more recently through devices such as Kindle and Nook. With greater accessibility and more channels to distribute content, media firms can offer advertisers more bang for their buck and surely that's a positive that encourages revenue generation.

What they loose in fees, media companies gain in data. A few years ago it was extremely hard to see who the eyeballs reading your advertisers promotions were but now you can tell everything about the person who visits your free online content. The metrics you can measure are nothing short of an marketer's dream and I see it as a worthy trade off between mass un-targeted advertisements to a more refined and individual advertising approach.

Murdoch is up against it. The only possible way I can see him winning this battle, is if all the other media companies in the world joined forces and declared paid content across the board in one instance... but that's not going to happen. Real time is now the key to publishing and waiting for content to hit the newsagents in the morning isn't going to cut the mustard. I refer to this story from CNN showing how the real time web is breaking traditional news boundaries, and how it can often mean hundreds of thousands of people consuming the story before any media outfit has reported it.

So there's my opinion. Don't fight it, embrace the openness of the web and find alternative, more intelligent ways of monetising your content.

Charging for content - Timon Singh, NGO Guest Writer

This is hardly going to be the most popular stance to take, but I believe the charging for content will become common place in the next few years. However, whereas Rupert Murdoch may want us to pay for every piece of news, I think this is an impossibility and that content charging will be mostly for 'exclusive' material, things we wouldn't mind paying a few pennies for me.

Let me explain: the news is everywhere - TV, radio, the Internet, newspapers... if Rupert Murdoch is really expecting people to pay just to hear 'the facts' from The Sun, The Times and The Wall Street Journal, then he's spent too much time in the Billionaire's Club.

People won't pay for something they can get for free, it's hardly working with the music industry at the moment is it? Also, the film industry is still plagued by piracy with people fighting rising ticket prices by downloading pirated version. To stop this, the film industry has hit upon 'exclusive' material - 3D films, IMAX movies... things that can't be replicated by downloading off torrent sites, if the news sites want to stop losing money as they are, they'll have to do something similar.

But what about advertising you say? Surely, these websites make most of their money from advertising so why should we have to pony up our cash? It's a good point, the problem is that you can only really make money from advertising-only if you have an enormous amount of traffic. If you're trying to make amounts like $50 million a year from your online advertising , you are going to need approximately 833 million page impressions per month at CPMs (cost per impressions) of $5 a time. If you drop that price to a dollar, you'll need 4.1 billion. Very few websites have that kind of traffic and as such, news companies especially the smaller ones, are going to need to find some other form of revenue.

The thing is, if Murdoch goes ahead with his plan, others will follow. Like it or not, he is a trend setter in the industry and no one will want to be left out giving stuff away for free whilst he makes a profit. There is a chance that these websites will see a temporary increase in visitors with people wanting free news, but methinks this won't be what people will be paying for. It'll be columns that have a dedicated following - your Jeremy Clarksons, your Ann Coluters, your Rick Reillys - articles people will happily pay for. And it won't be much, just a few pennies.

But how would these pennies be collected? One blog, Newsosaur, has a few ideas namely the use of a single system design to allow consumers to use their credit cards to fill up accounts to purchase online content - this could be anything from exclusive articles, to viewing videos, downloading pod-casts or logging onto an forum.

Newsosaur believes that whilst the amount charged would be up to the individual publisher, the price would be kept to "fraction of pennies to encourage readership. Consumers might not like being micro-nickled and nano-dimed for every article, but they would get over it, if the content were sufficiently compelling."

Also, at the end of the day we pay for content all the time. Despite news being on the internet, we still buy newspapers and magazines. Why? They provide us with content we want to read enough for us to want to pay for it. I honestly think it'll only be a matter of time before the consumer mindset applies this to online material as traditional forms of media are phased out.