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Free Web Content a "Myth," Claims Barry Diller
BotScout writes "Following in the footsteps of other traditional media executives who just don't get it, Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, said web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, and that's that. The media and technology executive said it's 'mythology' to view the Internet as a system of free communications. 'It is not free, and is not going to be,' Diller said yesterday at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Pasadena, California. Companies from Disney to New York Times Co. are seeking ways to extract revenue from the Internet. The latter recently said that it's considering a $5 monthly fee for access to its namesake newspaper's web site."
How often is content actually original and why shouldn't users go to where they're getting the best deal? Most of the news you find on the web are AP articles regurgitated to fill the day's edition or post quota. You can take this a step further and read an aggregator like Slashdot, where they (sometimes) extract the useful parts of the article into a summary.
Everything about the internet seems to fall back to one rule: the more effort you put into content production, the more popular it will be. There was a time when website owners thought putting up an empty forum would draw users, advertising money and content. Instead the users posed where content was being created on blogs, youtube and other mediums.
The final deathblow to out of touch assholes like Diller is the sheer lack of understanding of their target market. The internet crowd are a fickle bunch and their likes and dislikes wax and wane quickly. Shallow, crass, money-soaked attempts to steal their attention rarely work. Users can smell the money getting involved and abandon sites as they commercialise only to start their own successful reproductions of what made the first site good. The money just can't win this one.
I can't wait for them to start making massive donations to the Wikimedia Foundation for everything journalists just lift from Wikipedia.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
$5/month is too much to have multiple accounts and one source of content is never enough. Make it $5/year and I won't have to bee so choosy as to which sites I actually care about. Or give me free online access with my paper/magazine subscription. Most content is crap and what do you do about the social/user generated content? Charge me for that too? Are you going to pay me for comments? Refund my overpriced monthly subscription fee?
Places like the New York Times have put no decent effort into getting their internet traffic to back out. Their whining is getting ridiculous.
The cost per click of advertising on sites like the New York Times is pretty high. But they put their CPC ads below the fold where users won't click on them. They take the easy branding dollars for the top placements on CPM media buys. The problem with this is that most media buys are cheaper than paying per click(since it requires a high initial $$$ commitment), and are capped at 1 view/person/12 hours. So by the 10th pageview for someone, you're really down the crap inventory.
This is 100% the lazy way out. They should be making a self serve platform (to eliminate the 30%+ cut Google and other PPC companies take), and they should be aggressively looking for advertisers. Start tagging articles, have people bid on the tags themselves(to break down the different topics better).
Move the ads into more aggressive slots, and start putting non intrusive text ads on their mailing list. Quantcast shows them getting 66.5-79.5 million US pageviews a month, and quantcast is pretty conservative. So let's say they put 3 PPC ads in a decent position, and take the high number(79.5 million).
It's not unreasonable to guesstimate the adblock as a whole would get around a 2-3% click through ratio with good targetting. Even at 2%,that would be 1.59 million clicks to the ads per month. The prices would vary so much based on keyword that guessing past that is pointless, but suffice it to say most would be paying $0.75 on the cheaper end, and much more expensive for things about insurance, etc. And that's just one adblock. They've got the resources to monetize this, they just aren't. They'd prefer to use safe but low revenue CPM buys, and to let Google take a big chunk of their PPC revenue. Idiots.
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
Are you going to pay me for comments? Refund my overpriced monthly subscription fee?
Sure, but there will be an administration fee (say... $10k/y) to cover first. As soon as you have generated enough content in a year to pay the fee, I'm sure Big Media will be very happy to let you have your reduction in subscription costs. After all, we know how excellently they handle the equivalent with musicians...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
The NY Times essentially tried this. They sold subscriptions for their "premium" content. It didn't work. People either were satisfied with the nonpremium content, or went elsewhere. The problem was that the premium content really wasn't so premium and the other interesting content was available elsewhere. There was no added value. I used to regularly read Friedman's oped column in the NY Times. I thought he was very insightful. But then when they tried the premium content stuff, his articles were pay only. About that time I realized that his opinions on anything other than the middle east were irrelevant, so I just gave up entirely. Now that the nytimes has stopped premium content, I still haven't gone back.
Actually I think I stopped reading Friedman about the time I tried to read his book "The World is Flat." I about choked when he was quoting Balmer about how Microsoft had revolutionized the world with the internet. The entire book seemed to state the obvious about globalization, but he apparently thought he had discovered something amazing that none of the rest of us knew. Wasn't insightful at all, unlike his fantastic book "From Beirut to Jerusalem." Hence he should stick to what he knows: the Middle East.
"Paying for content doesn't seem to improve its quality or availability."
Really? Certainly there is a lot of good free content out there, and shit for-pay content. However in general for-pay content has to reach at least a certain minimum standard or the financiers will pull the plug on the production, whereas any twat can film their friend skateboarding into a wall and post it on Youtube. Most of the good free content also tends to be shorter works - there is only a small supply of genuinely good free content of substantial size (feature length films, novels etc).
Generating content takes time, and people's time costs money unless working on the content is very exciting and it can be done completely in people's evenings and weekends. Some content can't be done this way (films with non-negligible budgets, newspapers), and if a funding model can't be developed then it will disappear. There is no guaranteed right for "This asshole" as you call him to make profit, but there is also no guarantee that newspapers or journalism as a whole will continue to be a profession. (If all of the newspapers go bankrupt the newswires such as AP will lose most of their their paying customers and will also disappear.)
User-generated content is good for some things - "Look at this shaky footage of a train crash", or "Here is an angry rant about how the train crash is the fault of liberals/conservatives/meat-eaters/atheists etc". It's less good at patiently sifting through documents and interviews to put together a rational explanation of why the train crash might have happened because most people can't quit their day jobs to have time for a proper investigation.
I don't believe that most of the proposals I've heard for how to start making money from newspapers will work. So I guess that newspapers (whatever technology they use) will end, or will degenerate to the level of the local freesheet.
It's amazing that the same people who say that the advertisers should pay for the whole system are also the ones trying to cut advertising out of their feed - who use AdBlock, who listen to XM because they can't stand constant advertisements, who use DVRs to skip past ads, and who get movies on NetFlix because watching them on TV have too many ads. And the same people who also think that the prices of media content - like DVDs - are way too high and need to come down.
Well, guess what. Free content and no ads means no content. Free content and ads means a LOT of advertising. You want the next movie you see to be interrupted by an ad every 2 minutes?
A lot of people on Slashdot want to eat their cake and have it too. Content should be free and supported by ads - but we should get to block/skip ads!
Well, for quite some time I used AdBlock to only block those ads which actively annoyed me. Text ads like Google's had a 100% change to get my eyeballs, and also still images and even not too aggressive animations had a very good chance to stay. Sometimes I even clicked on some ads. However, over time the work required to manually block selected ads got too high. Now I'm using AdBlock Plus with its pre-made block list. Which means I don't see any ads at all now. Which is bad news for those few advertisers which stayed reasonable, but they shouldn't complain to people like me: It took me quite some suffering until I decided to go the easy way of total-block. They should complain to the majority of unreasonable advertisers, those who think flash ads, aggressive animations and the like are a good idea. The cost of being friendly to reasonable advertisers just went too high.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I think that is pretty much the intent of Diller's rant. He is attempting to chastise all digital consumers in one swoop for failing to pay for his clients' content and preferring free alternatives.
Strangely enough, nobody will stop his clients from charging their customers. We'll just stop being customers and take our <$0.01 business elsewhere. There is no content in "The New York Times" that I feel worth investing 15% the cost of my entire internet pipe just to see. In contrast I do pay $10/yr for Wired magazine, and they actually bundle that up in paper with pretty graphics and drop it on my doorstep. Yeah, apparently even if every story in Wired were online first and for free, I'd still pay for their rag just so I don't have to bring a laptop into the bathroom with me. Since the content can be had online for free (and earlier, is it?) but I'm not drawing it there, this demonstrates that I am not paying for the canned content but for it's delivery.
Now if I wanted to kill thousands of trees and blow $50/mo for more than one man is ever going to read, then I could get NYT's bathroom delivery feature as well. But, two magazines per month is about all the data I consume in that niche, and current political minutiae interest me less than technological innovation. So even if the comparison were fair, Wired would win in the battle over the audience of "me".
When I'm out of the bathroom, I aggregate dozens of blogs. They don't cost me anything and the trees get to live. I'm neither subscribing to nor paying attention to what misinformation embedded reporters in iraq are being paid or fooled into feeding me, nor the spin some editor wants to place on a story about some bill in congress. I draw my data from enough varied sources to correct spins and slants by sheer volume. NYT needs to rethink not only it's revenue model but it's content model. Just like AOL which fell before it, NYT must stop trying to do the thinking for it's users and charging them for the privilege. Cut the fat, and focus on obtaining revenue for and delivering what can't be had elsewhere (perhaps investigative journalism) and drop expenses for which free alternatives abound (AP feed, endless op-ed). What are they seriously doing with all this money they charge us and the advertisers anyhow?
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
Large businesses and media companies have tried to do to the Internet what they did to Christmas...turn it into a cash machine. Unfortunately, the Internet was not designed as a profit vehicle, it was designed to share information and facilitate communication. As a user above mentioned, there are plenty of people who contribute content for free, as I am doing now, or who host their own websites, as I also do.
Personally, I look forward to the day when the net returns to a library and public square instead of a shopping mall, where I am charged for looking in the windows.
There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
I suppose the real worry is that if the noise from content industry execs gets so loud then legistlators decide to win their war for them, either by making ISP levy a tax on it's users which is distributed amongst various interested parties or by attempting some kind of ban on free content. And this is the crux of the matter, a lot of web content is self-generated, either blogs, tweets, youtube video's, vanity sites, even professional authors/musicians/film makers giving away their art for free. There is no way that the content industry's can stop this on their own and if they do start charging for content then they will just lose large swathes of their audience as people shift to non-industry produced free content.
They need political backing to win their war hence the all the noise they make and the column inches that noise generates with the help of other vested interest.
Except you might be paying for it if they go to a "Bill the ISP" model like ESPN did. So the ISP passes along the cost to you whether you are using it or not. Pretty much exactly the same business model as cable tv. I fear this might be come the norm for Internet content providers in the future of it is successful, and there won't be a way to opt out, it will just become a new 'tax' on your internet access.
Sorry, but Diller is a wennie that does not get it.
Content will be free. Let me talk about my situation. Around 1999 I was a Microsoft Regional Director and I warned MS about open source. They listened to my and promptly ignored me and it was then I resigned my Regional Director post. Then in 2006 I saw how the online and Google killed tech books (I was an author). And now I see how news and such are being decimated by the Internet and their bloggers.
What people like Diller fail to realize is that bloggers can be just as professional. And like Slashdot there are people with good karma and bad karma. Those with good karma will get good ratings and be listened to, and others not.
The Internet is being reduced to a mediocrity and that is a good thing!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"