Comments on: The Debate About Paid News Content

By: The Gourmez

The Gourmez — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:47:20 +0000

Totally agree–why not try paying for news? It's obnoxious to have to find the news between all the ads, might be worth the while to just skip the ads and pay for the content!

By: John Zhu

John Zhu — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:57:54 +0000

As a consumer, of course I would hate it to have to pay for something that was once free. But from any perspective, I, like you, can't fault the media companies for trying paid content, not when their old model is broken and they are trying to find a way to survive. And if you were to ask me to draw up a model for a new media company in the current conditions, I would definitely incorporate paid content into it and lessen the reliance on advertising.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

By: John Zhu

John Zhu — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:54:05 +0000

Hi Michele. Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I definitely agree "curmudgeon" should be retired. It oversimplifies, vilifies, and polarizes.

By: Wendy

Wendy — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:00:26 +0000

I also concur with so much of what you've written here John.

At my former newspaper site we briefly had a separate paid site for sports blogs, recruiting news and other online exclusive material. It had a few thousand subscribers, which was about what was expected, but the paid site was dropped (this was around 2005) because it was thought advertising could generate more revenue on these pages than putting these content behind a pay wall.

That was a good strategy at the time because that's when online advertising on news sites was ramping up. Now that that's not the case, I don't begrudge news sites — or any others — from seeing if they can generate revenues via subscriptions or some form of payment for certain kinds of content.

Everything here is experimental, and you rightly point out that some of those screaming for experimentation are curiously against it here.

Thanks for the rational, grown-up reminder.

By: Michele

Michele — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:50:10 +0000

Nice post. I agree with much of what you've written. I think the "curmudgeon" label should be retired. It's not helpful to pretend this is an old vs. new debate with the info-wants-to-be-free faithful being the new, innovative progressives. It's an oversimplification for those who claim we have a debate between making everything free versus placing everything behind a paywall. There are many ideas for creating revenue streams and models and they need to be tried.