I seriously doubt they will be able to charge for content any time soon, although it concerns me. I own a Commodity Information Portal site with a real time rss reader.It uses push tech to create a scrolling ticker of stories. Registered users pick from a list of 100 feeds for free. I guess pay content happens the site will become a reseller of content? www.fmxconnect.com

WILL NOT PAY

Democratic Secularist Omnivore: Since CNN is no better than some guy on the internet, why pay?

They are all done.

Right, because if you read it on twitter it must be true.

Right, because if you see it on CNN it must be true.

I still think Salon had the best business model - full-movie adds you have to wait through if you're not a paying customer.

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that "almost all" news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.

So in other words, the Financial Times is going to start charging for online content and thinks that if everyone else did so then they wouldn't look like such jackasses.

Not.Gonna.Happen.

Morton_toes: drunkenmidnight: Morton_toes: drunkenmidnight: they sure do try to make money off the Internet. ISPs in the USA are trying to do metered bandwidth and charge you accordingly. Luckily, each time the big ISPs have tried it (Time Warner and Comcast) it has failed in their test markets.

If they ever start charging me for my bandwidth I will become a wifi pirate, and I will splice into other people's internet and set up rogue APs. I will piss off every IT guy out there that would have to deal with all my rogue APs.

I would be like the Robin Hood of the Internets!

Men in Bytes?

Well that would mean there would have to be at least 16 of us to make bytes plural, since there are 8 bits in a byte. I guess I am saying that 1 man = 1 bit?

Hmm.........

Nice pun btw

I would like to volunteer to be in your band of merry-men and assist with the plunder of the information aristocracy for the benefit of the masses.

/if it includes drinking ale & meade, that is.
//Oh, and wenches. Gotta have wenches...

Oh yes, beer, whiskey, and especially women. Though the women thing may not be as hard as you think, more and more women are becoming computer geeky types every day.

I must admit, there were times when I was low financially speaking, and I did steal internet access from a few places. I once lived behind a grocery store and in their deli/coffee shop they had free wifi. I totally plugged my router into their data drop (oh that sounds dirty) and then shoved it in a fake potted tree in the corner and I had free wifi for about 2 months before I had enough money to pay the fascist cable company corporate pigs and get my internet turned back on.

Best part was not a single person noticed and I went in and grabbed my router and it was still there.

elwood1972: Fine, I'll get my news the old fashioned way, hearsay and rumors and Art Bell!

I support this plan. The accurate portions are comparable, and the inaccurate portion (which is 98% of the total content ) is a million times more entertaining :D

Within a year, most news sites will be out of business as readers leave for free sites and drop a note to advertisers in HUGE numbers that they are gone.

The Los Angeles Times tried this and failed and I believe Newsday did as well.

/It would be like, I don't know, paying $50 a year for extra content and features.
//Who would do that?
///TF slashies

I like how Forbes calls their initial adwall a Welcome Screen, because it really makes you feel welcome. I wonder if they can count the number of people that leave the site immediately upon seeing that. Same goes for popup Customer Satsfaction surveys. If a B&M store treated customers this way at least they'd see the customers turn around and walk out. With an internet site it's hard for upper management to get a handle on how many people they piss off with this shiat.

I think the best method is to have the news be free, but to comment on it you have to agree to let the sponsors insert positive mentions of their products randomly in your post. Nothing feels sexier than warm sun on smooth skin. You've shed all but the lightest clothes to stay cool and comfortable. As far as we're concerned, you have one major job this summer: having fun. Nair® depilatories and waxes let you have more of it. We know you've got better things to do with your summer than shave every day. Or even every other day.

God dammit!

I've been wrong from time to time, but I really don't see this working.

I know that personally, if a news site I frequent starts charging, I'll go to another news site that doesn't. If literally ALL the decent news sites collaborate and charge for content, I'll just listen to NPR or other news on the radio. Sure radio has ads, but it has a volume control.

drunkenmidnight: I once lived behind a grocery store


Did you get their roaches?

/Did they get your roaches?

Where's my Foobies link? Oh, dang advertisers don't like it...

Pxtl: I still think Salon had the best business model - full-movie adds you have to wait through if you're not a paying customer.

I thought that sounded like a bad idea so I Googled it and went to the first link, Link (new window), I didn't find any "full-movie adds you have to wait through", so I clicked on a couple headlines. Still no ads to wait through. I think you might be getting ripped off if you paid them to not have the ads you speak of.

Had they presented an ad that I had to wait through, I would have closed the tab and gone somewhere else.

The main source of income for newspappers is, and has always been, advertising. Get enough companies to advertise on their websites, and content will be free.

Unfortunately, a significant chunk of that revenue came from classified ads. Craig's List, anyone?

Didn't CNN try this a couple of years ago? They started charging for video feeds. I quit going to CNN after that, so did a lot of other people I knew. I don't think it lasted very long. Why pay when you can go to a different site and get the same video for free?

Did the news outlets never stop and think it wasn't the method of delivery that led to a significant drop in profits- but the craptastic opinionated editorialized drivel they're pawning off as news?

Hey, we make the news. We're not paying for it.

Dahnch: I thought that sounded like a bad idea so I Googled it and went to the first link, Link (new window), I didn't find any "full-movie adds you have to wait through", so I clicked on a couple headlines. Still no ads to wait through. I think you might be getting ripped off if you paid them to not have the ads you speak of.

Had they presented an ad that I had to wait through, I would have closed the tab and gone somewhere else.

Haven't read Salon in a year or so, so they may have stopped doing this.

oldebayer: Craig's List, anyone?


Here you go.

$20 bucks for a fap? I start saving. Oh, farkers are so poor now

pcom32: I seriously doubt they will be able to charge for content any time soon, although it concerns me. I own a Commodity Information Portal site with a real time rss reader.It uses push tech to create a scrolling ticker of stories. Registered users pick from a list of 100 feeds for free. I guess pay content happens the site will become a reseller of content? www.fmxconnect.com

A very subtle plug. Are you in viral internet marketing?

real_headhoncho: Actually, what this farktard missed out is that the selling price of a newspaper covers the cost of distributing it (delivery trucks, paperboys, newsstands, etc). The money that is made on a newspaper is THROUGH ADVERTISING! This is yet another example of greedy bastards that want us to pay multiple times for the same thing while not producing new content. Here's the flaw in your model - people will go to the sites that DON'T farkING CHARGE!

If people are getting their news off of the internet rather than from a newspaper, it really screws with revenue. Assuming these people paid for a subscription, they covered the cost of delivery but, more importantly, they upped the circulation. Advertising is purchased based on the number of impressions, so if the newspaper circulation drops, the print ad revenue will fall.

Print ads provide a relatively high revenue because the circulation is very targeted. Most newspapers only circulate in a limited geographical area, so businesses targeting people in the area will pay a premium to ensure their ads are viewed by their target market. It makes no sense for Jim's Plumbing in Billings, Montana to pay for advertising in Jacksonville, Florida because it will not increase his revenue.

If customers now get their news from the newspaper's website, the only source of revenue is ads. Compared to print ad revenue, online ads pay a pittance because they are not targeted. Why would Jim's Plumbing pay a premium for ads on the Billings Gazette web page when viewers wouldn't be in Billings?

To compound the issue, the newspaper is not receiving any revenue to pay for its distributions as it was when people had physical subscriptions. Website hosting and bandwidth still cost money (especially if viewers want streaming video), but now this comes out of the already lower online ad revenue.

As it stands, online news sites still rely on advertising revenue as did newspapers, but the ad revenue is lower and the newspaper is no longer compensated for distributing the news through subscription costs. I can understand the thinking behind content subscriptions as it would compensate the newspaper for bandwidth and hosting costs and would likely create a more targeted user base prime for targeted advertising.

/ And this is assuming users aren't using AdBlock or NoScript

The first thing I thought when I clicked the page was, "what a f&*cking idiot." How the fark did this get a greenlight? Good job, minmins.

Like a hooker on a college campus...trying to sell what everyone else is giving away.

Gosling: WHAT WILL ACTUALLY END UP HAPPENING:

*One person will pay up.
*That one person copy/pastes the article and distributes it free to everyone else, making sure to delete all the advertisements in the process.
*Money made by newspaper: A couple bucks, maybe a couple cents extra if the copy/paster felt nice enough to click the ads.

Then MSM's version of the RIAA suing the shiat out of people that violoated the EULA they agreed to when subscribing to said website which details that you cannot reproduce the article will occur.

The cost of content on the web is borne by the provider. My hair is a bird. Your business model is irrelevant [find a new one]

The_one_with_that_guy: Then MSM's version of the RIAA suing the shiat out of people that violoated the EULA they agreed to when subscribing to said website which details that you cannot reproduce the article will occur.

One media outlet tries it and every single one of their rivals merrily shouts it from the rooftops. If CNN does it, for example, Fox and MSNBC rake them over the coals, and CNN is forced to back off.

karmaceutical: Maybe for abbywinters.com but that is about it.

*googles abbywinters*

Oh, hey.

*leaves thread*

dead_dangler: vernonFL: What kind of idiot would pay $5 per month to look at a website?

A drooling one.

I don't drool.

haemaker: Heh, I didn't pay to watch twitter out of Iran. Why would I pay some AP hack to repeat what they saw on twitter?

Reliability was supposed to be the hallmark of MSM. If they reported it, it was verified by multiple sources.

Now we have the 24 hour news cycle where there is no time for verification and MOST of the content is opinion.

Since CNN is no better than some guy on the internet, why pay?

They are all done.

You're conflating news providers and major media outlets. Lots of CNN content is just reworked AP content, which in turn is in part generated by picking up stories from local papers across the country. (Particularly since I think they're cutting back on their domestic production.) If news providers start requiring payment for news (think Thompson/Reuters financial data), they can actually make a profit in some cases. The problem is that sites like CNN will face a very tempting option to fill the void with ever-dumber news at the same old low cost. The result is that only the elites have any damn clue what's going on, which I'm sure would be great for our republic.

real_headhoncho: I'M A SMUG BASTARD THAT WILL MAKE YOU BEND
OVER AND SQUEAL BECAUSE I SAY SO

Actually, what this farktard missed out is that the selling price of a newspaper covers the cost of distributing it (delivery trucks, paperboys, newsstands, etc). The money that is made on a newspaper is THROUGH ADVERTISING! This is yet another example of greedy bastards that want us to pay multiple times for the same thing while not producing new content. Here's the flaw in your model - people will go to the sites that DON'T farkING CHARGE!

Unless someone makes an iMagazine that downloads the content off the web automatically...

Yep, I'm a greedy bastard for wanting a wage I can live through the winter on. A real bastard.

Anyway, the man's head of the FT, I doubt your shiny insight about where newspapers have traditionally made money is some sort of revelation for him.

I don't think subscription price and distribution costs are as closely matched as you're implying. It's seen more as a way of adding a small, subsidiary revenue stream while assuring advertisers that consumers value the content and that the paper isn't printing reams of copies that no one ever picks up (though skyrocketing newsprint prices have probably acted as a more compelling brake on that practice.)

Just because advertisers used to cover the cost of gathering news doesn't mean that it's necessarily the way it will work on teh intertubes.

Back in the day, if you wanted to know whether Britney was wearing underwear last night, you bought a paper. If you wanted to sell a bicycle, you bought a paper. If you wanted to know what the tax rate would be, if you wanted to know what department store had a sale on, if you wanted to know when the local senior citizens' club met, you bought a paper.

Now, most of those consumers have different outlets available to them. For the Celebrity Underclothes Update, you go to TMZ. To sell a bike or find a group meeting, you head to Craigslist. etc. And actually, both of those sites fill those functions fairly well: there's no need to reprint the latest news about a celeb. in every paper. The readers can just all log onto one website to check it out. In fact, it's better, because folks who want a picture can see it, and Mildred from First Presbyterian doesn't get bent out of shape about it being printed in the paper she reads at breakfast.

But one (or maybe two or three, depending on how you break this down) areas that have always been the domains of newspapers haven't found new places. Notable here are serious coverage of national, state and local news. I figure the Politico model is what we're looking at for national news. State news is anyone's guess. (Or at least I haven't got an intelligent thought on it.) Local news, the kind that society really needs, remains the bastion of newspapers, or what were newspapers. I'm guessing we'll just see the same apparatus shifted for use with online, rather than paper, distribution.

By local news I mean more than just the chicken-dinner circuit, though no other outlet really cares about that, either. What I'm really talking about are fact-driven hard-news reporting and investigative reporting, both of which are being pushed under by financial pressure. Perhaps the biggest winner in the whole internet-newspaper-death-tailspin has been corrupt government bodies, as angry_scientist noted.

angry_scientist: Gov. news coming to a console near you!

Would you like to know more?
Y
N

I mean, no one else is going to sit through budget meetings and tell you why you're paying an extra $300 this year in property taxes, or that the county's laying off employees, or that the big mine across the river just had an acid accident that sent four people to the hospital. I know that dedicated local bloggers seem like the answer, but their angst- and rejection-hewn shoulders make the chips newspaper reporters carry look like delicious, tiny chocolate chips. And even if they blog every meeting, they're likely not as good at breaking down and spitting back out information in a way that makes it apparent 1.) what matters and 2.) why.

The real humdinger, though, is that the most important investigative reporting (Deep Throat aside) doesn't happen at the national level. It happens when someone writes about your town's water supply, or local government spending, or a small town cop's abuse of power. That sort of reporting takes smart people many hours, and doesn't come cheap, even from the publicly minded.

But since those other media have taken all the other forms of news, the financial model no longer works. Before, that fluff new/classifieds/etc. underwrote the important reporting, which in turn leant legitimacy and prestige to the papers running the not-news (jacking up ad rates). Now, advertisers are unwilling to pay as much or online ads as they were for print, but don't want to buy print advertising because the internet is the new thing. With the cycle broken, real reporting is taking a beating.

So, the answer is to find a new way to pay for that kind of reporting, because we do need it. You have two choices: get advertisers or make information consumers pay for the news. The problem is that advertisers won't pay the rates necessary to create this kind of news, and consumer-based payment schemes require such high fees to turn a profit (particularly because of free competition) that news content has to be highly specialized. Lots of financial news is already like this (Bloomberg, Thompson/Reuters), so it makes sense that the way it enters the more broad-spectrum news world is through the FT. (I know Darth Murdoch is also working on a similar scheme.) So, for some stuff, we can expect high specialization and high fees.

For other areas of news, like general local news, there simply isn't an obvious solution. Folks like to criticize local news, often failing to distinguish between television websites and newspaper websites. Good local reporting is taking a beating, but 1.) it's needed and 2.) people have always hated their local newspapers, just like whippersnappers always need to get off of lawns. But we need it.

Another issue is public apathy: Last year, or whenever it was, when it was revealed by a paper's investigative reporting that warrantless wiretapping went much deeper than previously thought, the public's collective response was a yarn.

So, what's the answer for your average (which means small, local) newspaper? Like I said above, there isn't one obvious solution. Some people have proposed a Christian Science Monitor model*, where newspapers are nonprofit community groups. That might work, in some cases, but I'm worried about scale, particularly in poorer places. Anyway, I saw a good summation on this somewhere the other day: "You'll miss us when we're gone" isn't a good business strategy. It might be the truth, though.

*The CSM is one of the country's best papers (going/gone primarily online, too), not full of Christian Science junk like lots of people assume from the name.
**Very little of this is my own, original thoughts. It's an amalgamation from thinking about all the conversations I've had and articles I've read.

As long as the Paul Harvey show stays free, you can keep your "internets"

smerfnablin: dcb73: silly subby, unicorns don't fly.

Interesting point of discussion

If you have a horse with a horn, its a Unicorn
If you have a winged hourse, its a Pegasus

So if you have a winged horse with a horn, would you consider it

A. A winged unicorn?

or

B. A horned pegasus?


I just want to know what we are all supposed to ask for next year when we file our taxes...

I'm going with pegacorn.

Teodoro: tl;dr

Khellendros: Incorrect.

Scenario: MSNBC.com charges $5 for its website. Everyone goes to CNN.com. MSNBC loses 80% of ad revenue, of which only 10% is made up by the rubes that subscribe. CNN, which has done NOTHING NEW, see their ad revenue double. They didn't charge before, and certainly have no need to now. MSNBC declares bankruptcy, shrinks to 1/10 of current size.

With more than 10 major news outlets in the U.S., no one will be so stupid as to start charging. This doesn't even take into account people stealing and reprinting articles from pay sites. The ones that charge will die horrible deaths.

They'll just use that old oil company trick. They'll collude!

Fark is doomed. EVERYBODY PANIC!

Been saying this for a while.
These places have been giving their stuff away for free for years, and now it's biting them in the ass. People expect good worthwhile news for free, and despite the willingness to go Nat'l Enquirer Deluxe with some publications, most aren't willing to go that road.

What to do... dwindling subscribers, ever limited space for advertising, yet continued readership online. Well, charge em. Get together with other like-minded publications and cut your costs. Mergers. BIG mergers. The systems to handle all this stuff exists, it's just spread out all over creation. Bring it together all Hulu style and you've got 'News.com' or somesuch.

Some stuff will be free online. The good stuff, along with being able to search archives, editorials of note, etc, will cost you.

*shrug*
doesn't bother me, i already get the bulk of my current news from blog style web content.
the riaa war on the customer base didn't faze me and neiter shall this, i'll just do the same, simply not buy the product. it's not not necessary nor of decent quality anyways.

If ONE news site starts charging everyone will go to the remaining free sites.

If they collude such that they ALL (or most) start charging similar rates, that would be illegal price fixing.

I'm not seeing a path to paying for news here.

/Picture is for subby

No, I get my news from the internet, like a normal person under seventy. Farewell, dinosaur.

which means, of course, the best and/or most accurate content/news will be Free.

Windows costs money, but that doesn't mean its a superior OS.


i used windows for 8 years until i found a better/more secure/faster OS:Linux

and its free and built by a worldwide community.

The problem is charging for content on a medium where someone else is giving it away for free.

There have been rumours of facebook wanting to charge, and this has already got some folks looking at apps like Tonido as a method to share info with their friends.

What most folks keep forgetting is that these apps aren't really needed. It's hard to charge for something you can live without.

Khellendros: Incorrect.

Scenario: MSNBC.com charges $5 for its website. Everyone goes to CNN.com. MSNBC loses 80% of ad revenue, of which only 10% is made up by the rubes that subscribe. CNN, which has done NOTHING NEW, see their ad revenue double. They didn't charge before, and certainly have no need to now. MSNBC declares bankruptcy, shrinks to 1/10 of current size.

With more than 10 major news outlets in the U.S., no one will be so stupid as to start charging. This doesn't even take into account people stealing and reprinting articles from pay sites. The ones that charge will die horrible deaths.

You're underestimating Rupert Murdoch's greed. He's said recently that he plans on starting subscription fees.

dstanley: Teodoro: tl;dr

Then you missed one of the smartest posts ever written on the topic.
I'll reveal my bias right now; I'm a reporter for a small local newspaper.
Declining subscription has zilch to do with the perceived drop in reporting quality, though there is a good deal of that. It's all about the free crap.
There's no solution that's apparent to me, or I wouldn't still be sitting at a desk covering annual festivals and the occasional small-town corruption scandal.
Oh, and yeah, we do cover those - we do cover news that matters. If you have a local paper and you haven't looked at it, give it a chance.

In a year's time $100 won't buy a loafslice of bread, so that sounds about right.

subspace

That's the problem that scares the crap outta me!

Not losing another page of lining for a birdcage.