AP Considers Making Content Require Payment

TechDirt is reporting that the Associated Press is poised to be the next in a long line of news organizations to completely bungle their online distribution methods by making their content require payment. While this wouldn't happen for a while due to deals with others, like Google, to distribute AP content for free, even considering this is a massive step in the wrong direction. "Also, I know we point this out every time some clueless news exec claims that users need to pay, but it's worth mentioning again: nowhere do they discuss why people should want to pay. Nowhere do they explain what extra value they're adding that will make people pay. Instead, they think that if they put up a paywall, people will magically pay -- even though the paywall itself is what takes away much of the value by making it harder for people to do what they want with the news: to spread it, to comment on it, to participate in the story. Until newspaper execs figure this out, they're only going to keep making things worse."

Comments

Re:About time

[tjstork]

The NYT already tried this, failed and moved back to an ad-based free sit

The NYT is primarily an AP feed site for news, so of course there was no point. But the WSJ has a lot of original content, and they are doing ok. Indeed, original content is what you need to survive.

P.S. you might want to amend your signature, the current situation is hardly Obama's fault: From the day Bush took office to the day he left office, the Dow dropped a net of 2,306 points,

The DOW was up 4000 pts from swearing in to when it was evident that Obama was going to win. Since Obama's victory became more likely, then apparent, then actual, to his swearing in, the DOW has dropped in half.

As far as Obama's budget goes, he's already borrowed in his first 30 days more money than Bush did in his first 3 years, and, I would further add, that Obama's own deficit target is to be at just 500 billion, or higher than any of Bush's deficits ever were.