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Death to the free: Why recessions can be good
Posted in: Business Models, Content, Newspapers, Subscription Models, by: John Duncan
Jan 12, 2009
09:48 AM
A lot of people are talking now about the death of free content and the need to charge for what content we produce for our users. Good. The hegemony of the free has been a dead end from the beginning, a disaster for great content, an inhibitor of innovation and while the end of this orthodoxy will be painful for producers and consumers alike it will be better for all in the end.
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Comments
2009 01 12
james wilson - Another example are the local Business Journals. They have some content which is free, but much of it is locked for subscribers only.
2009 01 13
Marvin - It is too far gone to turn back now! The Internet is just like television...you don’t pay for it, you just turn it on and its paid for by someone else. If you do choose to pay for TV, it is for something that the producers of the content valued enough to charge for. Once the technology made the purchase of bandwidth possible, a free medium was now for sale! Owners of television real estate were able to sell outlets/channels to content providers passing a small fee to consumers (cable). Moreover, savvy business people used their more expensive television real estate as a means to entice other producers into licensing deals, buying up the “best” content early enough to turn a profit from customers who demanded it most (HBO etc.)! When the chance exists for a “producer” of content to receive a premium payout they usually take it, even at the expense of limited distribution/viewership of that content. The Internet is NOT a privately owned business, and though you can buy your piece of real estate along the information superhighway, no one ever has to visit you! There is so much “LAND” that any and everyone can get in, and as many times as they please! The only necessity is a knowledge of the alpha-numeric system and about 9 bucks (godaddy.com) and you have just effectively, eaten away at the total market share of essentially anyone doing business online.
2009 01 13
Marvin - Not only does this make it harder for that person to be noticed it makes it more difficult to charge for consumption of that site’s information. More competition, equals less demand, equals less need, equals less revenue. I do believe that information is important and producers of content should be compensated, however, there just happens to be over 6 billion potential producers of that content, and not enough demand to consume all of it! The Internet has more information available than all of the television programming, newspapers, and magazine articles ever produced in history, COMBINED. There are NO STANDARDS by which the Internet’s creative team are forced to abide by.
Use Wikipedia as an example! A baby, big enough to reach the keyboard, can write a biography on a historical public figure and it will be perceived as true by the masses. This information isn’t credible, it certainly isn’t valuable, but more decidedly, it is AVAILABLE!
2009 01 17
Rudolph - I am so glad to finally see people start to “call bull” on “everything has to be free.”
It’s always been a myth of the Internet anarchists.
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