Slashdot Mirror
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
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.