The official blog of Stathis Kassios for Business, Media, Economics & Arts

In a previous blog post I had expressed some concerns about internet sites & platforms that offer free content services like Myspace, that at some bleak point in the future they might stop running their business free of charge. Now the signs seem closer to reality without personally sponsoring a catastrophic prophecy for online users. In recent media industry news, New York Times (one of the biggest and most attractive sites in terms of its readers & visitors) will start providing some articles for free while charging users that want to read more, using some kind of metering system. If you think what this has to do in relation to your favorite music site, I would answer that there in not much of a difference when you consider for example that  News Corporation, which also owns & runs Myspace, includes news sites too in its various media branches These critical decisions could be applied to all of News Corporation's internet business. The free content, the delicate fr...

I believe that many Myspace users & artists have sometimes wondered about the fact that they receive so much attention for free. In other words, the Myspace miracle allows this obvious self - promotion without charging the user, providing free services, etc. That was the delicate story so far until I read that Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corporation, expects that in the near future all of his sites including Myspace, will start charging users by setting up subscriptions for example. The social networking site Myspace has showed declining revenues, causing a general alarm to the rest of Murdoch's media branches. Other authors have suggested that according to web history, similar - free of charge - sites didn't last long and were unfortunately closed down. So this leaves myspace with two choices. It will either start charging its users with a minimum monthly fee to keep it running or it will become a fading yet glowing webground.