As a woman, I can sympathize with The Gray Lady - aka the New York Times. Here she is, this intelligent, informative, credible source of online information, someone people continually go to for news yet never thinking of committing to. In fact, she’s been offering free content for so long that everyone thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to get it for free. But girlfriend, you’re right! It’s time for us to pay you what you’re worth.
Don’t get me wrong, I love free stuff. I’ll pass on something I have to pay for if I can find it for free somewhere else. But what does being free of charge say about the quality of the goods? Usually not very much. And this is the mindset that needs to change: we can’t assume that everything on the Internet should be free. Just because content went from the newsstands, where folks had to pay for their news, to the Internet – the business model should change? The content should now be free? If the medium changes, I don’t think the business model should change.
It would be wonderful if all content on the Internet – whether high or low quality – was free and supported by advertising. Unfortunately one-size-fits-all ad revenues cannot alone support high quality content. Quality content costs money to produce, and I don’t blame the New York Times management for demanding that their most prolific readers start paying for the content. This new approach has bothered some bloggers so much that they are vowing to no longer link to the New York Times, and many others are declaring that the paywall will fail, suggesting that folks will just go someplace else for their news.
New York Times blogger Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight - who has mixed feelings about the paywall - disagrees that there are plenty of substitutes for the New York Times. He decided to put his theory to test by looking at the news sources used by other online outlets, and the results were interesting. Associated Press was top ranked with 11.4 percent of all citations and the New York Times was a close second with 10.4 percent. The next closest was Reuters, which came in at 7.7 percent. The numbers kept dwindling from there, showing the fact that New York Times is not interchangeable with a large pool of news organizations.
While it is indisputable that the New York Times is a respected industry leader, the question remains – is its content high enough quality? I think that it is. I think something needs to upset the apple cart, and the New York Times and its readers who consume the largest amount of articles are probably a great place to start.
Do I think it always needs to be a revenue model? No. There are other models that can also work. Let’s take me for example. I’m willing to share information about myself to receive personalized ads in exchange for free content. This model makes complete sense to me, as the Internet is a great one-to-one medium. Instead of showing me diaper commercials (I don’t have a child) or pet food commercials (nope, no pet either), I can get ads tailored for me and the content I want. Win-win.
Today, the New York Times is taking a historic, first step to help wean us as a society off of expectations that all web content should be free. While I don’t think the New York Times will be profitable on this move overnight, I do think it has sparked a debate that badly needed to happen. The Times will help other content providers determine their content’s worth and showing a way to monetize it. I’m not sure if I’m in the 20-articles-or-more-a-month (without being directed from a social network or search engine) category that will force me to pay for content, but hey, I’m about to find out. And then I guess I’ll have to see if I’ll put my money where my mouth is.
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