Starting March 2010, the Timesonline.co.uk and the Sunday Times online edition will start charging users for online content.

As mentioned as early as May this year by Rupert Murdoch, his newspapers are moving away from the advertisers-pay model to a user-pays model. Since it was first mentioned there has been a big question mark over how this might be done, and now we know.

• The Timesonline will pilot  a subscription service for online users, with less frequent users being allowed to pay for a daily 24 hour access pass.The daily cost will cost about the same as a copy of the daily paper, about 90p ($1.50AUD).

A previously mentioned 'per-article' cost will not be applied, since they say, this could result in an increase in Britney-spears-type stories, with less Tamil-tiger stories.

Now, while I have been totally against Rupert Murdoch's paranoid statements about Google ruining his business, I am not in principle against this. It is a legitimate business model and I am interested to see what happens.

Their reasoning is sound - they want to protect the integrity of journalism - however their fear that this could not happen in an advertiser pays world is odd.

Also, Rupert's worries that people will rip off his content cannot be allayed, because for $1.50 we still could. (when I say we, obviously I don't mean me!)

While I agree that this could work, I also think that the content might not be unique enough, especially for my generation - why pay for the Timesonline, when I could get the Guardian for free?

Also I wonder, is this increased cost just going to be used to support offline newspapers? Don't online newspapers get enough revenue from their ads?

I can't wait to see how it all goes.