Rupert Murdoch’s decision to experiment with charging for content has ruffled a few feathers. Fair play to Murdoch for being brave enough to put his head above the parapet. If anyone can take the risk, it’s Murdoch — and the rest of the media will have him to thank if the gamble pays off and it reveals the business model that other outlets can follow. Malcolm Coles certainly makes a fairly good case to suggest that Murdoch can get away with it.

Without doubt, monetising content online has been a very tough nut to crack, so much so that many appear almost to have given up. Indeed, the controversy surrounding Murdoch’s decision shows just how much some people now believe that it is impossible to charge for content.

No doubt the advent of the web has changed the game. It is much more difficult to charge for something that doesn’t physically exist, and something which can very easily be distributed for almost zero cost. This more or less means that, if you want to, you can probably get it for free.

I know of one major national newspaper that found that having a paywall was detrimental to their business because they made more money by removing the paywall and instead displaying Google ads to the extra readers. Anyone who has used Google ads will know that we are talking about pretty low amounts here. It is a real demonstration that a simple subscription model will not work for everyone.

But we know that there are plenty of people who are willing to pay for content. As Malcolm Coles points out, there are countless examples of people paying for music, audiobooks and whatever else, when they could have got it for free. That is because, contrary to what many people assume, most humans have a conscience.

For instance, the pay-what-you-like or “honesty box” model actually seems to work. There is the example popularised by Freakonomics about the bagel man. Radiohead seemed to make it work when they released In Rainbows.

Just last week I heard an interview with a taxi driver from Vermont, USA who invites all of his customers to pay what they like. “Nobody has shortchanged me yet,” he says. Even in cases where cash payment was not forthcoming, payment in the form of CDs was.

The problem is, you won’t be able to charge anyone anything if you only serve up a pile of samey crap. Your product needs to be distinctive. The bagel man wouldn’t have done so well if he was trying to sell pens. Radiohead made it work because they are the best band in the world with a loyal fanbase.

But how many media outlets can offer something so attractive? The problem as I see it is not that you cannot monetise any content. The problem is that the content newspapers are producing just now is not the sort of content they can get away with charging for.

Jeff has suggested that there needs to be a sense of duty to buy newspapers, just like there is a sense of duty to vote. But people should only really pay for something that they value, otherwise inefficiencies will result.

If people still value newspapers, they should be willing to pay — and many still are. Most people would feel guilty otherwise, as the honesty box examples suggest. But the problem is that many people just don’t like newspapers any more, as is evident in the comments on Jeff’s post.

It is not as if there is anything wrong with the physical product, despite the jibe about newspapers being “dead trees”. I can imagine a parallel universe where the newspaper was invented after the internet, where the physical paper would be seen as a luxury item. You don’t have to be connected to the internet. You can fold it up and carry it about with you. You can scribble on it if you want to. You can frame it if you love it enough.

But the problem is with the content. With the advent of new technologies, newspapers have become much less useful to consumers. Once, newspapers were almost the only way to find out about the news. Today they are the slowest of many ways to find out the news.

How many times does a major story break late in the day? That story will be all over the breakfast radio and all over the 24 hour news channels. There will be countless reports about it on the internet, and to add insult to injury the bloggers will have had their say too. But if you want to read it in the newspaper, you will have to wait until tomorrow.

Maybe a major story doesn’t break so late very often. But even in these cases, the chances are that you have had ample chance to hear analysis about the front page stories on the radio or the television the night before. In essence, newspapers now do little more than peddle what is literally yesterday’s news.

Like the music industry, the newspaper industry’s mistake was to fail to adapt. They arrogantly assumed that they could carry on with the same template and tinker round the edges, fumbling around for a business model that would work.

Of course, most newspapers have websites these days. But if anything, that has exacerbated the problem. It has led to phenomena like churnalism, with journalists producing more and more content with fewer and fewer resources. As such, much of newspaper websites’ content is watered-down crap. Worse still, much of it is Digg-bait which has been SEOed to death.

That is the crux of the matter. The media is sullied, and journalism as a profession is held in contempt by much of the general public. No wonder people won’t pay for content — it’s not any good, and there is nothing to distinguish it from free alternatives. Why pay to read Telegraph Digg-bait when you can read BBC churnalism for free?

So is there a solution? Keep an eye out for my next article where I will put forward a few suggestions.

Some bloggers are in a flap at the moment because Google has seemingly manually downgraded the PageRank of some websites. The reason appears to be that the websites in question sell paid links.

Some of the websites in question are pretty big. Washington Post, Engadget, Weblog Tools Collection, Joystiq, Problogger.

This blog also sells text links, although I don’t think I’ve been hit by Google’s bitch-slapper. My PageRank at the moment is 5, which I think is what it was before. I don’t actually know, because I don’t really care about my PageRank as much as, say, my Technorati authority or the number of visitors.

Anyway. There are text link adverts on this blog. I was aware that the people who were buying the links were almost certainly more concerned about “buying” a better ranking on Google than something such as click through rates or trying to reach out to the readers of this blog.

But I hate to see junk results on Google, for sure. But do I feel guilty about selling links that contribute to this? No. It is individually rational for me to sell these links, despite the fact that I detest the method.

Why? Because if I am selling the links, I make money from them. If I am not selling the links, Google results are still equally junky because so many other people are doing the same thing. So I have two choices. Either I live with junky Google results and make no money, or I live with junky Google results and make some money. It’s a no-brainer.

Funny, though, how the changes leave Google AdSense completely unaffected! What a coincidence. When you look at how Text Link Ads (probably AdSense’s only real competitor) has been penalised to hell by Google, it begins to look like hypocrisy at best and a powerful Google using its might for “evil” means at worst.

However, it is understandable if Google takes a hard-line stance. They strive to have the best search engine on the internet, so of course they will do everything in their power to stop the “sale of PageRank”.

Their latest moves probably change the landscape a bit. It might put some advertisers off, but I doubt it will put any webmasters off. For as long as the webmasters make one penny more by selling adverts than by not, they will continue to sell adverts.

Of course, the reduction in PageRank could mean fewer people visiting via Google’s search engine. But I doubt many webmasters will be licking their wounds over that. From my point of view, for sure Google accounts for about two thirds of visitors to this website. But that is the least valuable two thirds (I don’t mean ‘valuable’ in monetary terms here, I mean in terms of their contribution to the website).

People who visit this website via Google view fewer pages than an average visitor. They are more likely to take one look at one page and then swiftly leave, never to be seen again. They spend an astonishing 30% less time on this blog than the average visitor. According to Rhys, he gets hardly any visitors from Google in the first place.

So if my PageRank takes a battering, I won’t be too bothered about it. Because Google provides none of the things that I value about blogging. Regular visitors are more likely to come via a link on another blog. And the best comments come from regular readers rather than the flash-in-the-pan visitors who might leave personal abuse then exit and forget all about this blog.

Come to think of it, I am the same when I use Google. I never expect to find the best websites by going to Google. If something is worth reading, I am likely to hear of it by word of mouth, either by reading other blogs or via links from my friends on Delicious, or whatever.

Meanwhile, if I want specific information, I am much more likely to search for it on Wikipedia rather than Google. Wikipedia might not be 100% reliable, but Google’s reliability is surely even worse. If I want a primer on any topic, Wikipedia usually gives me what I want.

What’s more, the links on Wikipedia are usually more relevant. Spam links are swiftly removed by the community of users. How many times has Wikipedia led you to a link farm compared to Google?

If I want information on a band I go to either Last.fm or Discogs. If I want to look up a word I use either Dictionary.com, Chambers of Urban Dictionary. Etc, etc. I know I still sometimes use Google, but what for? I can’t remember the last time I used Google search as anything except a last resort.

Hmm, looks like Google have started using those annoying all-singing–all-dancing image ads. It looks crap; quite offputting. Is anybody else offended by them? I’ll keep them there unless people really object to them, but I never keep up with how much money I’ve earned by having Google ads there because it’s not an awful lot so I might as well just get rid of them anyway…