The rise of the pay wall
You’ve probably heard last Thursday the New York Times has announced it’s content pay wall, to be launched on March 28th worldwide. If you’ve been off grid you can catch it here at Techcrunch.
All sorts of debate has been triggered by this and most of it not very complementary of the New York Times. Already people are talking about how the wall can be breached and what code you can use to automate that.
That people feel strongly the internet should be “free” whilst ignoring the cost of running it is an interesting sociological trend in it’s own right. How can something that costs money to produce be truly free to begin with? And if it isn’t truly free, which it can’t possibly be, who is paying the cost and how are they exacting their pound of flesh for that?
So there is my imperfect segway into last weeks article where I suggested Google isn’t so much ‘evil’ as ‘advertising’.
The clearest thinking about this paywall I found here at the Monday Note-“fair”-prices/ from Jean-Louis Gassee and Frederic Filloux. This quote on their outline of the basic problem:
Let’s start with the basic problem: the free model (read: advertising supported) cannot provide the financial support for an ambitious, in-depth, global information enterprise. This type of organization is inherently expensive. The depletion of print readership (expect a real 5-8% drop every year), and the corresponding loss in advertising revenue create an urgent need for new financial models. Otherwise, the likes of the Huffington Post will find nothing to aggregate other than the vast echo chamber they built their ephemeral value on.
So there we have the nub of the problem well articulated. If it costs then it cannot be free, it can only be free to some. And it can only be free to some if someone else pays for it to be “free”. So we face the problem I spoke about last week - the user has ceased to be the customer — because he isn’t the one who pays the bills.
I don’t want to see the death of thoughtful journalism. I don’t want to live off eight second sound bites of half reality or get my information from the amongst the unthinking drivel posted to twitter or Facebook. But as disturbing as it is that the New York Times, in fact the whole traditional new media industry, is hitting financial rocks it isn’t my primary concern right now.
Selfishly, I am concerned with the slide of my own industry into where a “free” cloud based model (read: advertising supported). Because it cannot provide the financial support required for thoughtful, tailored product solutions with decent support. We are an industry that ships buggy crap with a disclaimer called a license agreement. How will we get away with it without support?
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