Charging for content — who whines the loudest?

Charging for content is going against the trend these days.

New York Times dropped their "Times Select" a few months ago as did the Globe & Mail.

All it does is alienate readers.

Charging for archived material is another kettle of fish.

There's value in that. If someone's looking for an article on Subject X from 1994, they'll pay money I think.

But they won't for today's column by Joe Blow.

 

Re: Charging for content — who whines the loudest?

Oh, I didn't say it was a reason not to do it. Just pointing out an FYI for those who might not have realized it.

 

In the current economic climate, it just doesn't seem the right time to ask folks to pay for content.

As I said on the other thread, the money's in information about the consumer/reader/clicker. Google is already doing it. Google very much knows who we are and what we do.

Great article about Google in this month's Atlantic, btw, if you're into scary.

 

What kind of scary? It's almost my bedtime. Dare I ask?

 

I'll mention that at my nearest Exxon station and see what the attendant says. At the core, beneath all the holier-than-thou bullshit, newspapers are a business, not a non-profit (sans the SPT). Businesses need to make money to survive.

Show me a public service that doesn't need funding to survive.

 

I think the answer is you pay for the bells and whistles and the bare bones stuff comes free. People will pay a premium for information.

So everything beyond stories costs to look at. You throw in message boards, blogs, all the extras that makes web stuff interesting.
You can throw all the copy into a PDF viewer file and that gets around cut and paste.
You can make it work and that's a much better start than making everything free.
And the blogs — they can, well read what Joel Achenbach had to say on his BLOG!!!:

 

Here's the link.
Free, of course, to read. I won't go buy a copy now, neither will you. I won't see the ads or the other pieces of content. So I won't know if Atlantic is a magazine worth subscribing to.
And go worrying your pretty little head about me toting around a laptop to read. Printing it out to read on the ellip trainer at gym for my nightly workout.
Awesome business model.

 

It was weak (I bought the magazine, Jay! Woooo!). It's about how Google and the Internet is changing reading habits and conditioning people to not want to read as much, which might be true to a point.

But... it didn't focus much on an increasing number of distractions for a dwindling amount of leisure time, and its sources were older people, who aren't able to read as much as they used to, without mentioning 1) the leisure time issue, and 2) the fact that brains work a little slower.

I enjoyed the rest of the magazine, though.

 

Was the reference to a link a joke? Cuz I don't see one.

 

Nonsense.

Premium content = far fewer page views = much less inventory. That's not good when you're selling ads on a CPM basis. The subscription revenue you generate will not match, much less exceed, your loss in ad revenue. If that weren't the case, guess what -- we'd be charging for online content. Newspaper websites aren't free just for shits and giggles.

The print product is dying and tens of thousands of journalists will lose their jobs, you're right about that. But it isn't the fault of the "business and online departments." It's just evolution. Gas lamps went away when the light bulb was invented. The horse buggy went away courtesy of the internal combustion engine. You thought old news printed on dead trees would be a viable product forever?

 

PDF files.

 

I think the NYT's mistake wasn't in charging for content, it was in charging for the wrong kind of content. I really do not care enough about what their columnists have to say that I'd pay for it. If it's there as part of the package, fine, maybe I'll read if the subject interests me. The news content and features content, that's worth paying for. Their news content is not generic, it's proprietary. And so is every other daily's staff-produced news.