End of the Internet

Time weighs in ...

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191,00.html

 

Looks like another vote for "pay for content." I like it. It makes sense.

 

How does a site like Slate manage to make a profit?

 

I have no idea.

I also wonder how long it takes before BLOGGERS! and aggregaters just stop doing it because they aren't making any money.

Like, I can't imagine having a day job and then bogging for hours afterwards for no money.

 

Will all the anti-Fredrick people just read this article? This guy has it right. Will our business listen? Or will the cuts keep a coming to all newspapers? He's right about giving away our product for free. He just is. How the hell can any of you read this article and not agree with every fucking thing he says??
C'mon publishers it's not too late. KILL YOUR WEBSITES now. Go back to the old model.
Thank your.

 

I don't know you from Adam, so not sure what all the fuss is about. But I have to agree with you and Walter Isaacson in this instance. I love the idea of people paying 5 cents, 10 cents, etc., etc. to read articles on their NewsCard or whatever you want to call it.

 

I am neither pro- nor anti-Fredrick but do see the need for paid news, the alternative being very little news at all, in the very long run. But it makes no sense to kill any website, only to resurrect it once the pay formula/gizmo/widget that will work is created (and, ideally, used as close to universally as possible). Whoever comes up with that will be the first winner. Fredrick, how are your code-writing skills?

 

I'll bet he writes code in the third-person, too.

 

And it takes him 70 hours to do a JavaScript that most people can do in 40. Or something like that.

 

Isaacson's not right, either.

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5147184/how-not-to-save-newspapers

http://poynter.org/column.asp?id=45

Bill Keller:

"I found some things to quarrel with in his essay," writes Times executive editor Bill Keller. "He's a little credulous about The Wall Street Journal's online subscription model, which he seems to see as a stroke of modern business acumen. I suspect Rupert Murdoch's decision not to make the Web site free when he bought The Journal had a lot to do with another reality: The Journal's online subscriptions are bundled with print subscriptions, and freeing his online content would have hurt his print circulation, and thus potentially his print advertising revenue. ...Walter [Issacson] doesn't really grapple with the main puzzle of a pay model: how to keep it from stifling traffic, especially search-driven traffic, so much that online advertisers go away. I'm not saying that problem is insoluble. Just that, as far as I know, no one has solved it yet."

Posted at 6:08 PM on Feb. 5, 2009

 

I don't understand the "searchable" argument. As if the locals don't know how to find the Podunk News online after all these years.

Any "visitor" outside the local, normal newspaper readership is a only a bonus.

 

Well, the NYT and WSJ have a different situation than most U.S. dailies because many of their advertisers want to reach a national or international readership. But the local advertisers who compose the bulk of most papers' revenue are not interested in reaching readers outside a certain geographic area. That may change someday -- in 10 years who knows if brick-and-mortar stores as we know them will still exist, maybe it will be 80 percent e-commerce and every remaining indy local business will view the world as its marketplace. But right now, "stifling search-driven traffic" is really not anything more than a theoretical problem for most of the nation's 1,400 or so dailies, not to mention weeklies. Keller may be right to be worried about it, but that doesn't mean it should be a legitimate concern for most newspapers in 2009.