In August we reported about Rupert Murdoch’s announcement of an iPad only news publication.  His plan then and still now, was that this news publication would have no accompanying web site or printed edition, where the same information could be found.  Well, as the launch of the tablet news pub is coming near (early 2011), more media pundits are writing and speculating on this, the latest Murdoch product.  Many are saying things like “Murdoch gets it” and “This could be a game changer”.  What many fail to realize is that this is just another attempt at putting up a protectionist pay wall on another medium, whereby if he sees a glint of success, I foresee Murdoch moving his other titles down this path.  Let me explain…

With Rupert Murdoch’s pay wall rant and rave (by the way, not all of the promised Murdoch titles have been moved behind pay walls as he had suggested they would be) that many new media advocates detested, he is seeing little to no uptake with revenue or subscriptions online.  And these pay walls, in the first place, were erected to protect revenues Murdoch felt he was loosing from online eroding his print dollars.  Even Murdoch’s advertisers have spoken up and said that they have stopped advertising on his pay wall protected sites, as they were not getting the results they were hoping for. Murdoch’s Times Online title charges £1 for news access, a move that has caused the traffic to The Times site to fall by 90 per cent since the fee was introduced.  On a parallel, Murdoch plans to charge $0.99 per downloaded issue for his iPad only news publication or $4.95 per week, if looking to access content Monday to Friday.  This savvy publisher has found a way to sneak his pay wall methodology past the same media advocates that complained about it, when it applied to his web sites.

With the barrage of formidable readers already available for iPad users, FLUD, Pulse, Reeder, etc…, free of charge that gather content from multiple sources that cover topics I find interesting, I cannot see one clear reason on as to why Murdoch’s tablet news publication will lead to me paying $0.99 per day to read the content from a single news source – items they “push” to me, and not items I have asked for.

In order for his iPad news publication to have success and staying power, Murdoch will have to do  some amazing things with his content, and most of which calls for him opening up the editorial rules and being more flexible with what can be deemed publishable news … but his viewpoints on editorial content is a topic for another blog post….

In conclusion, hats off to Murdoch for applying his pay wall methodology on a medium of unsuspecting users, but in reality, we see this having about as much success as his online news pay walls did.  There just isn’t enough of a content or experience differentiation to warrant the rates he is looking for.

If you have been reading our blog over the past 12 months, you will know that we’ve tried our best to keep you all current on the newspaper publisher paywall discussions.  So, with that commitment, we bring you this little tidbit of news.  It seems as though Rupert Murdoch has taken to paying folks to pick up the printed version of his newspaper.  Let me explain…

Rupert Murdock’s ”The Sun‘ newspaper in the UK,  announced on Twitter that they were going to include real cash in thousands of their Saturday edition newspapers.  We see this as one of Murdoch’s marketing and mind-share efforts to see what he can do to raise print circulation for his brands.  However, what is most interesting about this is that he chose to test the “let me pay you for reading my newspaper” ploy, with the only free title he has left in the UK.  Could it be that Rupert is not seeing the results he had hoped for with his paywall shamble?  Is he ferociously looking for new circulation increasing tactics (because the paywall thing just isn’t working!) and as a result, is going to the extreme to pay readers?  Irregardless, the move to pay readers does seem a little desperate and limited in value, as it has no lifespan effect.  Unless Murdoch plans to pay his readers every Saturday, there is no guarantee that the person who picked up the paper this Saturday (when they were getting paid to do so) will pick it up again the next or any other day out of the week for that matter.   I think Murdoch may have lost on this one.

eBay has just taken another leap into online commerce, with the launch of their new service called eBay Group Gifts.  The move was  no doubt eBay’s way of letting us all know that they plan to ‘stay current’ and further expand out past their auction and classifieds brands, which they are so widely known for.

The eBay Group Gift service has taken the world of online social interaction and fused it in with the act of gift buying, primarily through the services relationship with Facebook.  The way it works is that once accessing the Group Gift site, you can enter the gift recipients name or connect to Facebook to find a recipient on your friends list.  Connecting to Facebook will allow you to take advantage of the services targeted suggestions, based on your Facebook friends (the intended gift recipient) likes.  Once you’ve selected the friend and an item to give them (only eBay’s ‘buy it now’ items apply), you let Group Gift know how much of the purchase price you are willing to kick in and of course input your Pay Pal information.  (You need a Pay Pal account to start a Group Gift, but those contributing to the gift do not).  Once that’s done, you can ask others to help raise the money to purchase the gift.  You can email contributors, post the item to your Facebook News Feed, or publish the URL on sites such as Twitter; all great methods to let related friends and family know that their monetary donations, to said gift, is welcomed.   Those willing to contribute will add funds into your Pay Pal account and once all the funds are collected, eBay’s Group Gift service will send you an eCard, with well wishes from all of the contributors, which you then of course will send to the intended recipient.

Given what the holidays or work retirement parties can be like, this will probably prove to be a great idea, if it is widely publicised and let’s face it,  there is no better time to launch a service like this than now, given that the holidays are right around the corner.

Each post holiday season we sit back and marvel at the numbers sites such as Amazon were able to bring in.  I wonder where eBay’s Group Gift service will fall in the mix?  I guess it depends on how much or even what eBay is willing to do to drive awareness.  One thing is clear though, I believe more grass roots, not nameplate merchants, will start to use social commerce or at lease be introduced to the idea through eBay’s Group Gift service, and that may not be a bad thing for customers looking to take advantage of current technologies and embedded rules of commerce, which usually equate to convenience.

Check out this info video on eBay’s Group Gift service.