Category Archives: free

Spiegel Online: Chris Anderson on the Economics of ‘Free’: ‘Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job’

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Chris Anderson: "I read lots of articles from mainstream media but I don't go to mainstream media directly to read it. It comes to me, which is really quite common these days. More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We're tuning out television news, we're tuning out newspapers. And we still hear about the important stuff, it's just that it's not like this drumbeat of bad news. It's news that matters."

Slate Magazine: Why Steve Brill’s plan to build a pay wall for print content is doomed

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Jack Shafer: "What's to prevent such Web enterprises as the Huffington Post, Nick Denton's Gawker enterprise, or some startup ... from purchasing the most expensive all-tiers pass from Journalism Online and rewriting or otherwise encapsulating the best and most noteworthy walled-in articles in real time—and then selling ads against it?"

Media Nation: Why newspapers can’t charge for online content

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Dan Kennedy: "I am not philosophically opposed to the notion that newspapers ought to be able to charge for their online content. The trouble is that it hasn't worked before, and it almost certainly won't work now. It's not that there aren't plenty of people who value what newspapers have to offer. It's that there are too many free sources of high-quality information, even at the local level."

New York Times: Bits Blog : The A.P.’s Real Enemies Are Its Customers

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"[T]he real problem is that the A.P.’s view doesn’t take into account what those accused of being news pirates are stealing. They aren’t depriving record companies of $15 CD sales. At worst, they are depriving paying A.P. customers of the opportunity to show people the same articles free, earning rather meager ad revenue."

The Economist: Making the web pay – The end of the free lunch—again

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"Internet companies are again laying people off, scaling back, shutting down, trying to sell themselves to deep-pocketed industry giants, or talking of charging for their content or services. ... [Quite] how Facebook or Twitter will be able to make enough money to keep the lights on for their millions of users remains unclear."

The Long Tail: My Two Cents on Charging for Content

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Chris Anderson: "what WSJ.com used to do was to offer a backdoor to free content for another class of consumer: the social media maven. Paying subscribers could make content free to others by clicking on an icon that created a URL for a free version of the story that they could use for blogging or to submit to sites such as Digg or Yahoo Buzz. ... The deal was essentially this: these often influential word-of-mouth generators could trade reputational and attention credits for free content. ... A very nice Freemium model, in other words."

Nieman Journalism Lab: WSJ: We charge, why aren’t you?

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Mathew Ingram's critique of Crovitz's paid content piece: "As for WestLaw and Major League Baseball and Xbox Live and iTunes, let’s remember that all of these entities control the content in an almost — or even outright — monopolistic fashion (and WestLaw doesn’t just own the legal data, it actually controls the referencing method for that data, which is used by virtually all courts and law firms). MLB and Xbox and iTunes content is virtually unavailable in any other format."

Chicago Tribune: Rescuing print journalism: Does Cable TV have the right idea?

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Eric Zorn floats yet another paid content idea: "I'm now a believer in the cable TV model. News organizations that generate significant original content should band together for their own survival and sell group subscription packages for unlimited access to their stories, photos, videos, archives and other offerings. For, say, $10 a month, a subscriber would have a choice of, say, 50 participating local, regional and national newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations. Another $5 might buy an additional 50 outlets, and so on."

WSJ.com: Information Wants to Be Expensive

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Gordon Crovitz has the best argument for paid content so far: "People are happy to pay for news and information however it's delivered, but only if it has real, differentiated value. Traders must have their Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters terminal. Lawyers wouldn't go to court without accessing the Lexis or West online service. ... For years, publishers and editors have asked the wrong question: Will people pay to access my newspaper content on the Web? The right question is: What kind of journalism can my staff produce that is different and valuable enough that people will pay for it online?"