Spotlight: James Murdoch

Kai Diekmann interviewed James Murdoch about News Corp business. First they were talking about the iPad app The Daily, which will be sold for 99 cent per week. The price is kept low to keep the barrier low, but bundles or premium-packages could be possible in the future.

Asked about the revenue of News Corp., Murdoch explained that 79 per cent of it come from the digital pay-tv-market. The German Sky is on its way to success as well - it earned money for the first in the past months. The biggest market for News Corp. right now is India. When going into a new market, what counts most for News Corp. is, that success and failure should largely be in their hands, and not depend on something else like political insecurities.

Diekman asked Murdoch as well about the possibility of a pay wall for The Sun, where Murdoch didn’t give a clear answer, but said, that you have to be careful with such an audience, but that the value of online ads is very difficult to control and that is better to have a direct business with the client.

Finally they talked about copyrights and the use of content by Google. Murdoch said, there was a good dialogue with Google these days, but that there is no answer yet. But he concluded that online and offline publisher needed to assert their copyright values more in any way for being able to invest in journalism.