Content platforms evolve, splitting and dissipating audiences as they do. This has been happening in the UK ever since William Caxton’s printing press put the town crier out of work. Fast forward to Channel 4 competing against ITV for advertisers in 1982; the rise of 24-hour news channels; then the competition from digital TV, web; and today from mobile.

Digital technology sped up the process so fundamentally — allowing ad networks to offer ever-cheaper inventory from proliferating aggregators, leading to ‘low-rent’ click-throughs. These make the media buyer look good by driving down the cost per click. Read More »

It is the most successful computer games franchise of all time and publisher Activision Blizzard is planning to cash in on that and begin charging gamers to play with the next instalment of

Infinity Ward’s ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’.

The eagerly awaited PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 Modern Warfare 3 is due in November and with the £40 plus price tag will likely come a subscription of around £5 a month as publishers of all kinds look to making their content pay. Read More »

Music streaming service Spotify is cutting by half the amount of time users can listen for free.

Spotify says its making the changes “to preserve the free service for all for the long term”.

Read More »

We’re only a little way into paywall territory at the New York Times after it went live on March 28, but Hitwise has put out some figures giving an early indication of how the paper is doing with its social media powered metered model.

Hitwise took a look at total visits to NYTimes.com for 12 days before and after paywall launch. There’s absolutely no surprise that there has been an overall decrease, but what’s interesting is this has not been as large as some might have predicted (in visits at least). Read More »

A day after Apple launched its new content subscription system Google is making its play for paid content with the launch of its Google One Pass micropayment system, which will allow people to buy content on any platform from a publisher signed up.

It is being launched this afternoon in Germany and the biggest name signed up so far is Axel Springer AG and Gruner + Jahr’s Stern (for all your diary scoops).   Read More »

News Corp’s exclusive iPad newspaper was unveiled at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City today by Rupert Murdoch, joined by Apple’s Eddy Cue, who was standing in for Steve Jobs.

Featuring a 100+ page newspaper covering current affairs, gossip, opinion, arts and life, apps and games, and sports with lots of complementary multimedia content such as videos and 360 degree images, The Daily is available just in the US at present, at a cost of 99c a week through the iPad App Store.

The application will update throughout the day and you’ll be able to comment on articles, share them on social sites and even have some of them read to you. Read More »

Beehive City is reporting that The News of the World, now bricked up behind its anti-social media paywall,  has witnessed a 38.5% drop in monthly unique visitors to its website between September and October 2010 based on comScore figures.

The News of the World paywall only went live  in mid-October so that is a particularly sharp drop as it includes half of the month when the site was still free to access. Read More »

Do you use Hootsuite as your Twitter client? As of now you might notice ads for major brands such as Starbucks, Virgin and Red Bull popping up in your timeline. In contrast to Pomoted Tweets, which were introduced in April and appear at the top of searches on twitter.com, these ads will appear in your actual Twitter stream.

Targeting the ads is of course key to each brand’s campaign, so if you’re the sort of person who follows coffee outlets and regularly praises the joys of caffeine in your updates, you’ll probably find a Starbucks ad appearing in your feed. Read More »

The respected US political blog Politico is to launch a subscription-based news service focused on health care, energy and technology next year.

The launch adds to the burgeoning paid content market and sees the firm that owns Politico again seeking to challenge established media players. Read More »

UPDATE – Figures out today from Nielsen are estimating that The Times has 362,000 unique users behind its paywall each month. There is no way to tell how accurate these figures are although Nielsen says it is confident of the number.

The metrics firm also says that rather than a 90% + fall in traffic at The Times and Sunday Times websites have suffered an 88% drop in UK unique users since News International erected its paywall. Read More »