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Here is the news: Buy Now

Newspapers are having a hard time as they face up to the challenges of a world in which their product is given away for free and advertising revenues are in a slump.

Some (such as Rupert Murdoch) believe the answer is to erect pay-walls around their content but others seem determined to try and explore new ways to leverage their content and the crowds it attracts so as to earn more cash.

And it's good to see that our own NZ Herald is "giving it a go".

However, I'm far from convinced that The Herald's strategy is a winner.

If you've not yet visited shopping.nzherald.co.nz then prepare to be underwhelmed.

There's a good range of product there and prices aren't awful -- but they're still not the cheapest you can find.

Take this JVC GZ-MS130 camcorder for example.

The Herald Shop's price for this is $650, apparently a $149 reduction on the normal retail price of $799.

With free delivery thrown in this looks like a steal.

However, a quick check using PriceSpy turns up apparently the same product for just $500, a further saving of $100.

So the NZ Herald shopping site isn't the cheapest and even when you factor in the free shipping, there are still better bargains to be had online.

One must ask therefore, why the NZ Herald even bothered getting into the online shopping marketspace.

The answer is simple -- they aren't doing this themselves, they're simply using the Hubsta online retail service so it probably costs The Herald nothing and you never know, they *might* score a few sales.

Hubsta provides the same service to Yahoo/Xtra where you can buy the same products at the same prices. eg: Yahoo/Xtra.

I really have to wonder if The Herald has thought this through properly though.

If I were a retailer contemplating the advertising of my products through The Herad's website I'd be mighty annoyed that they could well be offering to sell direct -- perhaps on the very page where my expensive ad was appearing.

I sure hope they thought of that before they waded into the online shopping idea.

No doubt we'll see more innovations coming from news publishers but I really think they ought to carefully consider the cost/benefit ratios of anything that may compromise either their core business (delivering news) or other revenue streams such as advertising.

I have a funny feeling that the NZ Herald's shopping area may disappear within the next year or so. As many others (such as Ferret) have found, there's really a whole lot more to online retail than just listing some products and implementing a shopping cart.

Of course my door is always open if any news publisher is interested in some *real* methods for generating powerful alternative revenue streams from their news content and traffic. Most of the ideas I was planning to implement through 7am.com are still valid, in fact even moreso now that the size of the Net has grown so much in the past decade or so.

Please knock if you're interested.

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