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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."
As open source site slashdot it, I'd like to ask the question that why is it such a big deal if some companies like to charge for users to access their content? This is same everywhere else, from movies to games and music. What makes content on internet different?
You pay for what you get. If you dont like to pay for it, you go elsewhere and dont get their content. Anyone who thinks its important or good enough can pay the low price for it.
This is why I pay for services like spotify and fileplanet. I think they give me good return on the (low amount) I pay them. Hell, people pay for slashdot to see articles before everyone else because it gives them some return they like. Its exactly the same thing here.
They aren't trying to get paid for *internet access*. They're trying to get paid from people reading their own made content. There's no problem in that.
This asshole can't see the forest for the trees. For every 'paid' content producer out there, there's a thousand people putting out far more content for nothing. Even more significant: paying for content doesn't seem to improve its quality or availability.
He knows it, we know it and the average guy knows it too. So why is he spouting this diatribe? Is there some sort of club for jackoffs who like to talk fucking lies, with the score keeper counting how many similar jackoffs rally to the call? He's a shill and nothing more. It should come as no surprise that he helped found Fox, an organisation that specialises in feeding subtle disinformation.
I say let the big companies lock out their content. It just helps smaller content producers find their niche and make some money through sponsorships and advertisements.
Barry Diller stated today that "the Internet free access model is clearly malfunctioning, as I don't make enough money from it. We have to educate people that free doesn't work, particularly for us."
Publishers hold that it is natural for readers to pay what advertisers once did, just as cows have to make up the difference out of their own pockets when the price of milk falls. "Without content companies, there would be nothing on the internet! Just as without pimps, sex would never have been invented."
Media commentators fear for the future of investigative journalism. "How can we hold governments' feet to the fire without money to pay our great reporters? Where would you get your recycled wire feeds, your Garfield cartoons?" Newspapers have suffered badly since the collapse of their previous business model of selling readers to advertisers on a local monopoly basis. The replacement models appear to involve phlogiston, caloric and luminiferous aether.
Publishers have also explored the notion of getting Google to pay its "fair share" for so parasitically leading people to newspapers' websites. The Wikimedia Foundation promptly started billing journalists for their reprints from Wikipedia. "We feel this is completely unfair," said Tom Curley of the Associated Press, "as real news stories spring forth from the heads of accredited reporters in an immaculate creation from nothingness. My preciousss." Maurice Jarre was unavailable for comment.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Here's what I have to say to those who want to charge $5 to read their "online" newspaper. Good luck with that. I'll be over here where the news is still "free".
Barry misunderstands the BASIC transaction basis of currently-free media (like TV): the ADVERTISERS are his customers, the VIEWERS EYES AND ATTENTION is what he's selling and the 'content' is merely bait to attract and hold the viewers for as long as possible.
So in a sense, he's stating categorically that fish are going to need to pay to enjoy the worms hanging on those hooks.
It's quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
And, for what it's worth? "Disney, the world's biggest media company, is developing a subscription-based product for the Internet, Iger said..." Disney: really good content producer, really BAD at predicting how they can exploit the viewers. I recall them saying categorically that Disney movies would NEVER be released in DVD format (for fear of piracy) and then they did release in a dvd format...DIVX. Everyone remember what a huge success that was?
No, if Disney's working on a 'subscription' internet, I'm going to bet strongly that they'll be wrong.
-Styopa
I imagine that if these sites start trying to charge their users for access, most people will just lose interest and look for a site that doesn't suck. For example, I like to browse slashdot and youtube, but if they started charging for basic access I'd forget about both in a heartbeat.
Any person or business can charge for access to their site if they want to. Others may choose to give information away free. Still others might give information away free, but include ads from sponsors on their sites. Some individuals might choose to directly exchange information, either for free or in exchange for value.
Regardless, no one is forced to use any particular website - if one chooses, and another provides the same information free, you can choose either one. If the one charging has unique information that no one else offers, you can decide whether to pay and get it, or not. If you have information you'd like to charge for, but there are a dozen other sites offering it free, you probably aren't going to do well. It would be wrong for you to try to get laws or regulations to block the ones giving it away for free.
This essay is a bit dated with some of its references, but the underlying concepts still apply:
http://www.worldofends.com/
I registered there years ago, but it's been years since I've logged in. First off, the stories are mostly knock-off crap for the 'unwashed masses', secondly how do you know their columnists aren't just poorly-paid liars like that clown Jason Blair? You can read better elsewhere, and if they do publish something factual you'd want to verify it anyway.
The Tea Party is just the GOP with a bag over its head.
fuck him and his company, (we) have spent thousands of hours removing his companies shit from our network
they target kids especially
http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/ask-toolbars/
http://www.google.com/search?q=iac+spyware
...Multi-Millionaire CEO's of International corps know EXACTLY what the little guy scraping by on minimum wage actually wants and needs...
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
I used to have a delivery subscription for ~$5/wk but I canceled it a while ago because it was nothing but extra clutter. When I canceled, I told the rep that I still greatly value the paper's content and would not mind continuing to pay some small amount to keep it going but, alas, they were incapable of taking my money without sending paper to my doorstep.
$5/month seems eminently reasonable, I hope they do something like that.
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?
It is hard to imagine how clueless an "executive" in this industry can be. Apparently, Diller is incapable of visualize himself in the shoes of others.
If most sites charged a subscription fee:
1) Personally, the only commercial site I visit frequently enough to be worth a fee is the NYT. There is no second place; not even close. If all papers charged a fee, I suspect that 80% of users would subscribe to NYT and nothing else.
Other than the NYT, I probably visit 1000 other sites per month seeking interesting reading. Diller would have me pay $5000 per month for that privilege.
2) Free ranging surfing would be discouraged because of all the fee-walls erected. Most users would never discover Diller's site in the first place.
3) As others have remarked, most users would be driven to the remaining subset of sites that don't charge a fee.
4) Given that we users like to change our minds frequently about favorite places to visit, if we did pay a $5 fee to subscribe, we would likely change our mind before getting value for the money.
If there must be a subscription fee, then the ONLY way it could work would be one $5 fee for all information sites to be allocated among providers in proportion to the actual visits they record. It would be almost the same business model as cable TV which shares subscriber fees with the providers.
Online gaming sites are a different story.
Barry Diller is a myth.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that all the websites out there started charging the eminently "reasonable" $5/month for access to content. In truth, it is likely that sites run by the likes of Barry Diller will charge decidedly more than this.
Before the economic collapse, I had a monthly books/CDs/entertainment budget of, say, $150. After the collapse, that budget is closer to $40. Assuming that I choose to spend 100% of my discretionary income on nothing but paid websites, and assuming that these will all be the cheapest, $5/month websites, that gets me eight websites, out of all the sites available on the Internet. I might as well shut down my browser and head to my library to peruse some dead trees.
I can't be the only person like this. Mark my words: the Internet will route around this damage.
"Imaginary solutions to real problems."
Some people actually do things because they enjoy it or want others to enjoy it. There are people who do charitable acts without want of tax advantages or recognition. As someone from the BSD camps have pointed out, some people just want to make their affect on the world and would like to see their work out in the world being useful. Free web content isn't so different and all those things released out there in the creative commons and the like are evidence of people simply wishing to express themselves and to share it with others.
... was that you're not going to see content that is paid for through your ISP subscription. You pay the ISP for bandwidth. You pay a content provider to decide which bits are ones and zeros. He didn't rule out advertising as a means to pay for content. He didn't even rule out good-will as a means to pay (he just didn't figure in things like free open source because it's just not in his sphere of thinking).
Which of you readers of Slashdot is going to put up a popular web site and run it totally free to access and entirely devoid of content? And I don't mean some puny little personal blog page. I mean a major popular site with a million visits an hour. Unless you are already filthy rich and want to blow it on this, it ain't gonna happen. And if you do fit that category, the site still isn't free because whoever you ripped off to get rich is paying for it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Let's look at the record of Barry Diller companies.
So you can see where Diller is coming from. His ad-based businesses have been disasters, while his transaction-charge businesses have done well. (Lending Tree had some bad years because they speculated in mortgages, instead of just brokering them.)
A lot of this idiocy comes from the use of the metaphor "content". If music and other artistic works were called what they are -- *expressions of human creativity -- a lot of this would go away.
It's obvious, of course, that people generally don't make objects, products, "contents" (of containers, presumably) and hand them over to others without getting paid for them.
But the idea that people will not express themselves creatively -- will not write, sing, and talk about the things that are important to them -- without getting paid for it is .. um.. less obvious*
*i.e. false
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Perhaps we would be better off without the giant new industry and instead rely on people spreading free information amongst each other.
What has the growth of the news industry given us? We now have 24 hour news that knows full well there is not enough news to fill 24 hours so they repeat the same stories making a mountain out of a mole hill just to fill the time and get viewers watching and Fox news-like content that tries to pass highly biased opinion as fact.
The news industry is screwing up society. We could do with some of these companies going out of business.