If Murdoch's newspapers weren't so conservative maybe they wouldn't be losing so much money
August 06, 2009 4:15 pm ET by Eric Boehlert
I'm actually goofing on the loopy argument conservative media haters have been making for years, which is that consumers are reading fewer newspaper (and advertisers are buying fewer ad pages) because the product is so liberal; because newspapers turned their back on mainstream readers.
The holes in that argument are self-evident. (I'm pretty sure this thing called the Internet has a lot to do with newspapers' woes.) But it also doesn't hold water because guess what? Conservative publishers like Murdoch are also losing their shirts.
From the LA Times' report on Murdoch's News Corp. and its gruesome earnings report:
News Corp. had a brutal quarter ending June 30, as the company swung from $1.1 billion in net income a year ago to a net loss of $203 million...Print media wasn't too pretty either, however. News Corp.'s newspapers division reported a 63% drop in adjusted operating income to $96 million. That reflected significantly lower advertising revenue in the U.K., Australia, and from the U.S.-based Dow Jones group, which includes the Wall Street Journal.
Here's the punchline: Murdoch is now saying he's going to start charging a fee for online content to all his news sites. Because I guess he thinks people will pay to read the New York Post online.
Good luck with that.
for all the words of vitriol and all the words of hate.
But, they don't really read, so maybe pictures would be best -
they should ask old Billo for that pic of Putin's chest.
(Hey, Mr. News ain't the only guy around here who can write lousy rhymes.)
APPROPRIATE a slice of EVERY DOLLAR paid to Pay TV
'Basic Cable' BUNDLE.
Whether any one watches channels of Murdoch, OR NOT!
You pay and watch TV, Rupert gets richer.
You pay and turn off TV, Rupert gets richer.
Every month.
Last I checked, ADVERTISERS paid for most stuff. This has always been how stations get their money. Remember ratings? Networks use ratings to charge advertisers for their ad blocks. Murdoch doesn't pay anybody but his employees.
If there is no ad revenue, Murdoch and other honchos make no money.
Fail. But you're welcome to try again.
Screw Murdoch. Hell, screw 'em all.
Or do you? If so, then Murdoch does get a prorated slice of your monthly payment no matter if you were away on vacation for a month and did not turn on any channel and watched none.
In cable TV's beginning (promotions) a significant enticement was the claim of being 'commercial free.' Over time, and through corrupted Congress diluting legislation, commercials came on Pay TV. By now you are probably correct that ad sales revenue is "most" of it, more than subscriber fees.
Yet subscriber fees account for approx 1 billion dollars per year per channel in the 'Basic Package.' And the prorated shares have been changed (from equal share for each 'Basic' channel) to some ratings-weighted proportional shares, although cable & dish still have NO viewer ratings measurement standard. Nielsen never got there; and in the beginning of cable the governing fear instituted a system design to deny (Big Brother) cable operators from detecting which channel in the 'Bundle' a viewer watched and for how long, if at all. Which (lack of ratings' audits) inhibited ad sales using the conventional (broadcast) model of pricing based on ratings.
(Revenue estimating: 100 million paying subscribers. $50 per month, ($600 per year). 12 'must carry' channels of the 32 'Basic Package,' plus 20 more 'specialty' channels in 'designer' menu combinations, plus some 'premium' or 'pay per view' channels. Essentially, IF a 'national' channel 'share' gets 1 dollar of every 50 paid every month, that's 100 million dollars per month and in 10 months it's a billion bucks.)
(Ad sales: IF a :30-sec spot goes for $10,000 and a channel sells 50 each hour that's a half-million dollars ($500,000), for 10 hours of 'primetime' viewer ratings that's 5 million dollars a day, and in a 300-day year that's a-billion-and-a-half (1,500,000,000) bucks. Actual results vary, as you may fiddle with the numbers. Compare Super Bowl numbers: 1 million dollars for a :30, say 40 of them in an hour and it's a 3-hour show: $120,000,000. Just sayin' ....)
FYI, as a never-reported historical fact, of interest, at the inception of cable TV (c. 1975), there were not enough (network) 'feeds' to fill the 8-channel 'Basic Bundle' and so: Nearby the 'only' satellite up-links in existence (around the CIA/military facilities in Virginia), were churches where a single camera could produce 4 hours of long-winded sermon 'content' on Sunday morning, and then Wednesday evenings were added, and then a 'studio set' in the church basement 'feeding' 8 hours a day, all in rapid evolution -- you figure it out and voila! televangelists began. There was never religiosity on 'network' TV, 1945-75. (Disregarding Bishop Pike and maybe a couple others of the ilk, in regions.)
Cable subscriptions, (in 1976, say, 10 million, $10 a month, 8 channels each get 1 dollar and the cable operator gets 2), was the Cash Cow succulence that created Robertson, Falwell, et al., (apart from and dwarfing the churchy 'collection plate' charity-donation envelopes' money which viewers mailed in), and those televangelists directed that ($10,000,000 a month?) subscriber fees into politicking ostensibly to 'overturn Roe v. Wade,' and those politics begat Reagan begat Newt begat Dubya begat the rightwing lunatic whacko neo-con perversity and derangement in quote-Government-quote, these days.
Boycott Pay TV: Smash rightwing fascism. ... and Murdoch, too.
I thought he was only being self-promoting when he recently tried to disparage the competence of the entire CNBC staff, but maybe he really believes it. Maybe nobody's brave enough to show him real statistics of investor success between CNBC and FBC viewers? Not that CNBC is perfect or infallible, of course, but I really haven't seen many endorsements of FBC by Wall Street heavyweights.