Making sense of the intersection between media, society and technology
In: internet|journalism
16 Jan 2008The world is shifting towards a model where everything is free – free software, free music, and, of course, free news.
The question is what is the cost of free. How much are we prepared to pay for the privilege of “free”, asks the ReadWriteWeb:
We are raising a generation of kids who do not want to pay monthly subscriptions for anything. Give me stuff for free and stick some advertising on it. This is also dangerous for another reason. Teens are growing up with not only a sense of expectation of free, but sense of entitlement to free.
Journalism is one area where free is causing huge headaches. Craigslist effectively undermined one of the main sources of revenues for newspapers, paid classifieds. Google News makes all the world’s news accessible at the click of a mouse, without any distracting advertising on the page.
Even the New York Times reached the inevitable conclusion that it had to give away all its content for free.
There is no turning back the free movement. But quality journalism is an expensive business. The problem is we simply don’t know what new business models might emerge. While we try to figure this out, what are we in danger of losing?
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This blog is run by Professor Alfred Hermida, an award-winning online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator.
No Responses to How much are you prepared to pay for free?
quirkyalone
January 17th, 2008 at 3:47 am
>> Craigslist effectively undermined one of the main sources of revenues for newspapers, paid classifieds.
Yes, but mainly because of the newspapers negligence. They could do that themselves before Craiglist did.
Ian Kemmish
January 17th, 2008 at 6:12 am
You can go back one stage further still – before people got around to paying by subscription, then paid only for what they bought.
Subscription funding of ringtone companies, advertising-based funding of media production, support-fee funding of software development, and taxation-based funding of farmers are all examples of subsidy. Subsidy has never acted in the consumer’s interest, and I don’t expect ever to see it do so.
Bryan Murley
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:06 pm
But the readwriteweb folks have a shaky premise. Young people do pay monthly subscriptions – they’re called bills. Cable, Internet, Cell Phone, Online Game sites, Premium cable channels, music download services, etc. It’s just not the things “we” (being the media) would like them to pay for.
Alfred Hermida
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Good point Bryan – and that’s the rub. The revenue goes to the carrier rather than the content producer. However any ideas, like the recent ‘iPod tax’ initiative in Canada tend to meet strong resistance.