Giving away the product for free online

We've had these threads before, but something occurred to me this morning while reading about the music industry taking on file-sharing sites. As an industry, would we be equally fiercely protective of our product, our creative enterprise, if we made it available only by subscription but discovered people outside the company had found a way to offer it to people for free? As it is, we're the ones doing that, and we seem to be OK with that. Or are we?

 

And we're off ....

The music industry's main source of revenue is sales. Newspaper's is advertising, not sales/subscriptions.

 

Yes, I've read all the threads and had the discussions, and yet ... I thought I'd post this. Feel free to ignore. I didn't get much sleep last night. My judgment is clouded. I will be a bad poster today.

 

And network TV's main (read: only) source of revenue is ads, also.

But you don't see NBC, ABC, FOX, CBS posting their news shows, sit coms, etc. for free on their websites. And they sue or force youtube to remove posts of said shows.

Who would watch TV if you could just log onto the net and watch it all for free, commercial free? (I supposed one could argue TiVo is sort of like that, but anyway...)

But we as newspapers keep giving everything away, allow bloggers to steal from us and anyone else link to us.

 

SSM, you're right about YouTube for now.

But in fact, CBS announced a huge deal Thursday in which it WILL be giving away a great deal of content for free on various websites, advertiser supported only.

http://blogs.business2.com/business2blog/2007/04/cbs_embraces_we.html

 

And NBC has a number of its shows available online for free:
http://www.nbc.com/Video/

ABC appears to do the same:
http://dynamic.abc.go.com/streaming/landing

And this so-called "stealing" and "linking to us" ... well, it provides traffic to the site when people click on that link, you know.

 

Yeah, lantaur, I missed that one.

This is a good thing, SueMe, not a bad thing.

 

That's wrong. ABC posts all of their shows online. So does MTV. All of them with fewer commercials or no commercials at all.

I think ESPN.com is doing it the right way. Have some stuff free, have some paid, and gradually move all of their content toward the pay side.

 

Fair enough. But I notice the shows are like Miss America Pagent, the struggling Apprentice, the ratings-are-down 30 Rock, Andy Barker PI (which I've never heard of) and the cancelled Black Donnellys. Most of the "lest popular" shows. You still have to watch TV for, example, the Office and ER - staples of NBC.

What they're doing is the equivalent of a mid-sized daily posting the AP/CP/Wire stories for free and making you buy the paper for the local bread-and-butter content.

I don't watch enough TV to be an expert

 

No, I don't think we would.

It's just a different mindset, to me. I mean, I can share the paper with everyone in my office, but I don't necessarily let everyone in the office make copies of my CD.

That's just my first take.

 

I had not seen this discussed elsewhere, but it sounds like a whole lot more papers are trying to give their product away as well. Not included of course is Tribune and Sam Zell already has said papers needed to stop giving away their valuable product.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-yahoo13apr13,1,4723120.story?coll=la-headlines-business

 

Revenue and profit aren't the same thing. Circulation is 20-25 percent of revenue, but is more than 20-25 percent of costs. So eliminating circulation costs would increase profit margins, assuming other revenue remains the same.