News Corp.'s Project Alesia Shelved for Now
News Corp. says it still believes in the notion of aggregating newspaper content and selling it online: problem is, no one else seems to be ready. — That, at least, is the word emanating from the ruins of News' Project Alesia …
Context & Ripple Effects
Project Alesia was the latest step in News Corp.'s long push to own digital distribution rather than rent it: back in November 2007 the company built its own online ad network to monetize traffic across its properties directly. Alesia extended that logic from ads to content itself — a single storefront where newspapers could pool and sell their stories online.
That storefront now sits in ruins, at least for the moment. Per the Hollywood Reporter, News Corp. says it remains committed in principle to aggregating and selling newspaper content, but the effort stalled because other publishers were not ready to join — a coordination failure, not a declared change of heart.
First-order effects
- News Corp. stops investing in Alesia's build-out, and the cross-publisher storefront it envisioned disappears as a near-term licensing outlet for newspaper content.
- Other newspaper owners face no forced move today — but the absence of Alesia leaves them without a publisher-controlled alternative for selling aggregated content online.
Second-order effects
- With no shared platform on the table, publishers revert to pursuing paywalls and digital sales individually, fragmenting pricing and distribution across competing schemes.
- News Corp.'s digital-distribution energy shifts back toward channels it fully controls — its own titles and infrastructure like the ad network it built in 2007 — rather than coalitions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large publishers will repeatedly fail to coordinate on shared aggregation platforms, ceding that layer of the value chain to intermediaries built by technology companies instead of by the content owners themselves.
The trend: Publisher attempts to collectively control online news aggregation keep stalling on cross-industry coordination, leaving distribution power up for grabs.