Bloggers get all worked up — again

[JayFarrar]

So David Lazarus has the bloggers worked up again.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus26dec26,1,7125045.column

Lazarus argues again that the free internet is a bad business model.

Newspapers, including this one, give away the store online, all the while wringing their hands about declining revenue and circulation. Everyone says the Net represents the future of journalism, and that's probably true. But at this point, no one knows how to make much money at it.
I'm scratching my head trying to come up with another financially challenged industry that found salvation by charging people nothing for its output.

And like Lazarus rising from the grave, the bloggers react...
http://time-blog.com/curious_capitalist/2007/12/even_before_the_internet_news.html

News was already pretty close to free long before the Internet came along. It was free on TV, free on the radio, and effectively free in newspapers when you consider all the valuable stuff that came packaged with it for 25 or 50 cents, from comics to crosswords to classifieds to supermarket ads. And unlike, say, a song--which was free on the radio but worth spending money on to be able to play again and again whenever you wanted to hear it--a day-old newspaper was usually less than worthless.
What's hurting newspapers now is not the fact that people were willing to pay for news offline and aren't willing to do so online, but that their days as the monopoly conduit of timely written information into Americans' homes are over. The delivery boys have been displaced by Comcast and AT&T and Google and Yahoo, and there's no way newspapers will ever reclaim that role.

We've went down this road before. I've always thought that the free model was a bad idea. The problem is that if the web is the delivery boy, how do the papers get paid for the content being delivered?
The idea that the news has always been free is a popular talking point for the bloggers. I'm still not quite sure how they came to that conclussion, except that it agrees with their position that the internet should be free.
But if that is true, how do papers pay for the content? How do they pay the creative types?
The writers strike is similar, in a way.
In some ways, we are in a golden age of entertainment and information. Almost everything the past generation paid for, is, mostly, available for free on the internet, assuming you don't mind breaking a law or two along the way.
If enough people quit paying, then how do the companies get paid? Well, they don't. Then they put out an inferior product or the cheapest to produce product out there to keep revenue coming in. The consumers who were in it for the quality complain that the product isn't as good as it used to be and they fall away.
So the idiocracy rules the roost, so you get more gossip, more smut, more reality TV.
Every attempt to discuss how to fix it, gets met with a chorus from the basement blogger set screaming, "free, free, free."
Nothing gets down and then it gets worse.
The AP is part of the problem. They are distributing my work, your work, for free on the wire. I don't get paid for that, neither do you. My paper doesn't get paid for that, as a matter of fact, the paper pays the AP for the wire. The yahoos of the world pay the AP for the wire, so the AP gets paid, but I don't.
First step in the revolution is for papers large and small to quit contributing to the AP report. No more local content, outside the stories the AP bureau produces on their own.
No more voting in the AP polls from the state prep poll to the top 25. No more, nothing.
If you want my work, pay for it.

 

[OnTheRiver]

Well, if not for our work, what could most bloggers link to?

 

[spaceman]

The AP is part of the problem. They are distributing my work, your work, for free on the wire. I don't get paid for that, neither do you. My paper doesn't get paid for that, as a matter of fact, the paper pays the AP for the wire. The yahoos of the world pay the AP for the wire, so the AP gets paid, but I don't.
First step in the revolution is for papers large and small to quit contributing to the AP report. No more local content, outside the stories the AP bureau produces on their own.
No more voting in the AP polls from the state prep poll to the top 25. No more, nothing.
If you want my work, pay for it.

http://www.ap.org/pages/about/faq.html#2

 

[thebiglead]

"But at this point, no one knows how to make much money at it."

Not technically true.

http://www.thestreet.com/s/no-bust-in-internet-stock-boom/newsanalysis/techstockupdate/10394879.html?puc=googlefi
"Research firm eMarketer predicts that online ad spending will grow 29% in 2008 to $27.5 billion in the U.S. alone. Paid search ads and display ads will account for about 40% and 21.5% of the spending, respectively."

If you look back to July 2004, eMarketer had only predicted $18 billion in 2008. So clearly, some people do know how to "make much money at it."
http://www.emarketer.com/Report.aspx?code=ad_spend_aug04

Projections for 2011 seem a bit insane.
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1004635

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

And like Lazarus rising from the grave, the bloggers react...
http://time-blog.com/curious_capitalist/2007/12/even_before_the_internet_news.html

News was already pretty close to free long before the Internet came along. It was free on TV, free on the radio, and effectively free in newspapers when you consider all the valuable stuff that came packaged with it for 25 or 50 cents, from comics to crosswords to classifieds to supermarket ads. And unlike, say, a song--which was free on the radio but worth spending money on to be able to play again and again whenever you wanted to hear it--a day-old newspaper was usually less than worthless.
What's hurting newspapers now is not the fact that people were willing to pay for news offline and aren't willing to do so online, but that their days as the monopoly conduit of timely written information into Americans' homes are over. The delivery boys have been displaced by Comcast and AT&T and Google and Yahoo, and there's no way newspapers will ever reclaim that role.

Cute how you lump Time's business and economics columnist in with "bloggers", trying to imply he's sitting in his basement wearing only underwear while typing out angry screeds. If Justin Fox had written the same thing and they put the title "column" over top of it, would you be whining so much?

 

[Rumpleforeskin]

"But at this point, no one knows how to make much money at it."

Not technically true.

http://www.thestreet.com/s/no-bust-in-internet-stock-boom/newsanalysis/techstockupdate/10394879.html?puc=googlefi
"Research firm eMarketer predicts that online ad spending will grow 29% in 2008 to $27.5 billion in the U.S. alone. Paid search ads and display ads will account for about 40% and 21.5% of the spending, respectively."

If you look back to July 2004, eMarketer had only predicted $18 billion in 2008. So clearly, some people do know how to "make much money at it."
http://www.emarketer.com/Report.aspx?code=ad_spend_aug04

Projections for 2011 seem a bit insane.
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1004635

Do you ever not link anything?

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

"But at this point, no one knows how to make much money at it."

Not technically true.

http://www.thestreet.com/s/no-bust-in-internet-stock-boom/newsanalysis/techstockupdate/10394879.html?puc=googlefi
"Research firm eMarketer predicts that online ad spending will grow 29% in 2008 to $27.5 billion in the U.S. alone. Paid search ads and display ads will account for about 40% and 21.5% of the spending, respectively."

If you look back to July 2004, eMarketer had only predicted $18 billion in 2008. So clearly, some people do know how to "make much money at it."
http://www.emarketer.com/Report.aspx?code=ad_spend_aug04

Projections for 2011 seem a bit insane.
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1004635

That money is spread very thinly across the vast Internet, though. If anyone were making piles of money from advertising revenue on a single site, everyone would be following that model.