IF ANYONE CAN, THE ECONOMIST CAN
Although a report yesterday suggesting all of The Economist's content could be placed behind a pay wall has been dismissed by the publisher as "premature" surely it can only be a matter of time before online readers have to pay.
I believe the content produced by The Economist has value and, hence, readers will pay something to read it. It's also unique, and I think that's the most important aspect of the whole online payment debate.
For a long time I've said that any move to charge for content online needs to be backed up by ruthless copyright enforcement. The Economist is certainly ahead of the curve in that respect, however technology will need to be implemented to stop that paid-for content being widely distributed for free. In the print world that would be like buying one copy of a newspaper and photocopying it thousands of times. The publisher will lose revenue.
In Thailand I feel there are very few publishers that can currently make a success of charging for online content. Stories are far too similar and often come from the same sources and press releases. All publishers would need to adopt a paid-for model for it to work here and that's simply not going to happen anytime soon.
1 comments:
Recent moves by prominent newspapers to charge for online access (eg. Times Select) has shown that readers will not pay for general news content (even when it is as articulate as The Economist). Paying for a physical copy of a newspaper or magazine seems like a fair transaction, but a fair price for a copy of a web page is zero.
Anyway, advertising has traditionally been the main source of revenue for newspapers, not newsstand prices and subscriptions. But they can't make as much money from web advertising as from print.
The web has changed advertising because the supply of news and advertising venues has increased dramatically - and newspapers are no longer in control of the supply of news. So advertising revenues have, and will continue, to drop.
Pay-for-access works for the Wall Street Journal and other niche publications like the FT because business and investment news is a specialist market.
The basic problem is that as the shift from print to the web accelerates, news industry revenues are no longer covering the cost of their operations. Newspapers and magazines need to adapt because the size and scale of their operations were built during a period before the internet was ubiquitous.
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