Will We Soon Be Paying for Content?

Filed in archive Advertising on August 24, 2009

Internet advertising has one foot in the grave and Congress is thinking about helping it into the coffin. If it dies completely, what will the new revenue model be for the Internet? There aren't many choices. BusinessWeek looked in some detail at the most obvious of those choices recently: paid content.

News Corp. (NWS) Chairman Rupert Murdoch said recently, though, that he plans to charge readers for content at all the company's Web sites. It already charges for The Wall Street Journal, but Murdoch plans to extend that model to FoxNews.com, as well as newspapers like the New York Post and The Times of London.

Maybe it's time to take a deep breath and accept that the idea that advertising can support the entire content industry is a fallacy.

BusinessWeek mentions Barry Diller's recent argument in The New York Times that people would pay for content "because they always have." Well LOL. "They always have" isn't the brightest argument in a changing world. I pay for some content - but all of it is technical/professional content, like the Reading Research Quarterly and the Teaching Exceptional Children.

It was a little hard for me to decide whether the BusinessWeek article (by Lars Bastholm) was serious in its conclusions. Lars rejected the idea of micropayment. He's right to do so. I browse news headlines and blog post titles constantly. If I had to pay 19 cents for every Reuters story and TechCrunch article I've half read and abandoned - well, I'd be a very broke person (and possibly homeless). Lars suggests a content fee attached to the bill you get from your Internet provider. Like radio, we could start tracking how much each particular piece of content gets used and conpensating the authors in a manner similar to music royalties. Of course, along the way we'd be able to collect a huge volume of information about every American with Internet access, and we could produce additional funding for content sources by selling that information...

Things that make you go hmmm.

I'm not sure what revenue model will fund the Internet a decade from now, but I'm betting against Lars Bastholm model.


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