If you break down the Sun’s content, I’d guess that it’s maybe 10% “Exclusive” (in the genuine, Kate Moss drug photos sense), 20% tits and the rest a pretty standard blend of tabloid “news” – ban this sick filth now, mum gives birth to baby that looks exactly like Norman Tebbit, and so on.

People are unlikely to pay for the tabloid churnalism, and they certainly aren’t going to pay to see tits as it’s my understanding that Murdoch doesn’t have a monopoly on those. (Or would that be a duopoly?)

That leaves the genuinely exclusive stuff – perhaps not “news”, as you or I would define it, but content that you can only find in the Sun ,at least for a few hours until the rest of the webs gets it. Rupe’s challenge is to get a largely C2DE audience to pay for that, online.

But if you can’t find the Sun’s content online, you won’t know that Charles Kennedy is shagging Susan Boyle to search for it. For that, you need to walk past a screaming front page in the high street, and then you’re buying it anyway.

Obviously the same does not apply in the same measure when you’re talking about the Times etc. But, as you say, the same principle holds. People will only pay for online news if what they are getting is genuinely new, interesting, and worth the money. At the moment, precious little of it is.