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Perth MusicNew York Times frees its content
Content should be free.
That’s why it’s significant that The New York Times is rumoured to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content including archives.
There’s nothing I find more frustrating than following a link to a paid subscriber story and it’s not just The New York Times that is guilty.
The largest offender in Australia is the Australian Financial Review.
It’s hard to know what may have pushed The New York Times to make the change, but maybe they realised that they were damaging their own web readership and a number of theories have been floated including that their own online subscriptions were in decline.
My personal opinion is that as news consumers we either pay for content or we put up with ads. As I’m a strong believer that content should be free, I’m happy to put up with ads as the trade-off.
It’s an important point for publishers with the headline today in the Financial Times that online advertising will overtake US newspapers by 2011.
It’s a scary time for traditional media stalwarts, but it’s good to see they are waking up to the industry they are now playing in.
I suppose the fear that moving content online could mean people stop buying their paper, becomes a little mute if people are not buying it anyway.
Give people what they want and you will be rewarded in the long term.
Here’s what CNet has to say on the issue, and as always Scott Karp has some interesting observations as well:
The new economics of media make charging for content nearly impossible because there is always someone else producing similar content for free — even if the free content isn’t “as good as” the paid content by some meaningful metric, it doesn’t matter because there’s so much content of at least proximate quality that the paid content provider has virtually no pricing power.
UPDATE: Argh! Just realised the Financial Times is another offender, hit on online this story after reading its piece on line advertising.
