Tax on Google proposed by the French

An interesting idea from France who has proposed a "Google tax" on online advertising revenues to fund subsidies for musicians and newspapers struggling in the digital era.

Interesting in that it was rebuffed by the sector and yet maybe this is one way of cross subsidising the media.

Google after all are profiting from essentially using free content.

According to the Independent

The report recommended ways to boost the availability of cultural material online while also protecting artists' and the media's intellectual property.
It suggested taxing online advertising as well as Internet providers and using the revenue to aid creative sectors, such as the music industry, which are struggling to adapt to the age of downloads.

Green shoots from Ernst & Young for the media

Journalism.co.uk brought my attention to the latest business survey of the media.

This time it comes from Ernst and Young who conclude that

Migration online by publishers and media organisations before the current economic downturn will help them respond more quickly to the crisis,

However there are many structural changes that may have to happen

1.Cutting costs may not suffice-instead companies will need to rethink their undderlying business models

2.The profit forecasts from many media companies do not fully reflect the challenges ahead for them.

3.Unlike the previous downturns,this one doesn't follow an advertising boom.Thus when GDP starts to grow advertsing will recover a lot quicker.

Funding the media-the cross subsidization model

The network’s genome carries the “free” nucleotide. As in both freedom and free goods and services. Like it or not, its publicly funded origins (universities and the Pentagon) led to the emergence of widely adopted services such as search engines or Wikipedia. In turn, these have sealed the fate of the paid-for model as the dominant one. Right. I intentionally emphasize dominant. Because like everywhere else, hybrid forms are likely to emerge

That is Frédéric Filloux talking about how to acertain extent the media has shot itself in the foot by making the internet to all intent and purposes free

Consequently the fully paid up model no longer works online unless you are selling specific and specialised information.

However in Filloux's mind there may be exceptions in the form of a cross fertilisation between the paid for and the free

The online magazine Slate came up with an interesting idea: charging people. In fact, a small fraction of them. Introducing another flavor of the hybrid model: a tiny proportion of users paying a fee that will subsidize the vast majority of non-paid ones

and then there is China where

the software industry has been working that way for long: 80% is bootlegged versus 20% generating license fees, but the market is so huge that even a tiny monetized slice is sufficient to insure a sizable revenue stream for software makers

Crowdfunding the answer?

Can anything save the journalism business?

One buzz word that seems to be going around is crowdfunding and it all stems from an aarticle written by Mark Glazer over at Media Shift.

So what is Crowdfunding?

Basically it is creating a link bewteen the journalist and what people percieve is content wiorth paying for.

Over at Spot.us the concept is very simple.

1.Anyone can come up with a "Tip" or story idea they'd like to see covered. People can "pledge" money toward that story.

2. Freelance journalists can sign up to cover those story ideas or pitch their own stories, attaching a cost to writing the story.

3. Once a story has a journalist attached to it, people can donate money to help fund it (but no one can give more than 20% of the total cost of the story).

4. When the story has full funding, the journalist writes the story, and a fact-checker is paid 10% of the funding to edit and check it.

5. Before the story is posted, news organizations have a chance to get exclusive rights to the story by paying the full cost, which is given back to the donors. Otherwise, the story is posted online and any news organization can run the story for free.

Will it work?

Well it is early days at the moment.The project has been funded by the Knight's Trust and is run by journalist David Cohn.

It certainly has potential for the local interest or specialist journalism.

But I wonder with the link between funder and journalist very direct,is their a ethical content issue here.