Why won't this work?

How to justify making people spend 25 cents for one online story when you sell a whole paperful of them for 50-75 cents?

 

This is all we need... The big shots saying the freeloading has to end, and it will end.



Diller Calls Free Web Content a ‘Myth, Joins Refrain

By Brett Pulley and Andy Fixmer

July 24 (Bloomberg) -- Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, said Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, joining the refrain of media moguls who say an era of free Internet content is ending.

 

The problem also lies in somehow (legally) managing collusion. Say you're a medium-sized market website that subscribes to the AP wire. If everyone else,all the big national sites, start charging to see that content (assuming Google and Yahoo do also), why isn't it in your personal best interest to keep it free and just rake in ad revenue as people go to your site over others?

Of course the other subscribers would threaten to pull business from the AP unless they put pressure on the site offering the content for free.

So you'd have to have the AP, Reuters, etc. all agree that their subscribers have to institute some sort of pay model, or else people will root out where to get that content for free and will go there.

If you look at how other industries got people to start paying for their content (like, say, the music industry) they did it by itemizing content online, forcing people to make more purchasing decisions but at a much smaller rate. That could work, but it couldn't be on a per-story basis. I think an online-only model where you pay a standard rate and then pay extra for the other stuff you want. (So you'd get local and A1 news for a base rate, maybe national news for a different rate and then can pay extra for sports coverage, or business coverage, etc.)

It's a workable model that relies less on ad revenue that is prone to these economic slowdowns, especially since there's really no equivalent to the full-page or insert ad online anyway. But the problem is that most papers still rely on revenue from the printed product (which is actually the most expensive part of their operation, generally speaking) but they don't have the liquidity to get away from a paper and truck operation because they're so saddled with debt.

I just wonder how long an industry that is filled to the brim with highly educated people and has a product that people are desperate for can go without at least stumbling into a solution to keep that business solvent.

 

The tide is shifting slowly.

In a few years, within 5, payment will be the culture.