Those newspaper executives who seem to be casting around for someone to blame for the downfall of their empires may want to look at the lessons learned by the music industry. Of particular interest is this from today’s Guardian:

“The Norwegian study looked at almost 2,000 online music users, all over the age of 15. Researchers found that those who downloaded “free” music – whether from lawful or seedy sources – were also 10 times more likely to pay for music. This would make music pirates the industry’s largest audience for digital sales.”

Then, take a look at this from the 2008 Pew study:

“Newspapers would have suffered even greater losses without their online versions. Most of the loss in readership since 2006 has come among those who read the print newspaper; just 27% say they read only the print version of a daily newspaper yesterday, down from 34% in 2006.”

So what is really killing newspapers?

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Anyone interested in video on the web – and particularly making money from video on the web – should pay close attention to the partnership between MTV and MySpace, which uses fingerprinting technology to allow the broadcaster to identify video being ‘pirated’ and shared on the web.

So far, so old news. The significance is this: the technology is being discussed not as a way to stop people ‘ripping’ and embedding video material, but to actually encourage them. Why? 

The money.

From ReadWriteWeb:

“Once identified, the MySpace-hosted MTV content becomes an advertising platform for MTV. Auditude allows them to add a video overlay to the clip, advertising the content source, the original broadcast date, and links to purchase the entire episode or other related content.”

Auditude, the company behind the technology (note their slogan: “Audience-powered media”), say more:

“So every time you post a clip of Jon Stewart ripping on the presidential candidates, someone is going to get paid, and users won’t have to deal with the often-clunky proprietary video players offered by each network. And instead of trying to prevent these clips from making it onto MySpace in the first place, content owners will want users to upload as many as possible.”

Similar technology was introduced by YouTube last year – but the ability to monetise clips was only mentioned as an aside, and while it has seen some increasing success, the noises coming from MTV, Auditude and MySpace are different, and suggest they might finally be understanding that users are their biggest distributors.

Other networks are expected to follow in signing up. Broadcast news and newspaper video are obvious candidates to benefit – how long before we see a ‘Rip this’ button?

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