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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 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.
People paying for content is not the issue here. Execs thinking that a for-pay service in a world of for-free services will be viable is. There will always be a free alternative and that is where people will go.
People like Mr. Diller believe that if everybody gets together and starts charging for content then consumers will have no choice but to pay up.
The fact is there will always be a free alternative. I'm not saying there isn't or won't be a market for premium content.
Just that there will always be free. Free-as-in-beer and hopefully free-as-in-speech.
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
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
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
No kidding. People barely tolerate having to register at the NYT website and that's free. If they actually expect that people are going to be willing to pay money to read it, they're going to be in for quite a shock.
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
Actually he's right in one respect... The internet ISN'T free. Someone IS going to pay for it. It just wont be me.
People will only pay for something they can't otherwise get for free within a reasonable amount of time or with a reasonable amount of effort.
...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"
Agreed. Greywolf's Corollary to the Streisand Effect: As long as someone else has the same content available for free, users will go there instead of to your site, given the choice.
My blog
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?
Congress.
Are a lot of local newspapers going out of business because the Internet has destroyed the model of simply reprinting the AP feed in order to sell classified ads? Absolutely. You can get the AP feed from tons of web sites, and classified ads have been taken over by Craigslist.
Maybe AP content will continue to be free on the web, if enough web sites see a traffic boost from it worth the cost of subscribing, then the cost of generating AP content can be kept low by spreading it across many web sites, and end users won't have to bear it.
But Diller is absolutely right that premium content will be paid for one way or another. There is simply no model right now that supports the free distribution of movies that cost $140 million to make and would additional require huge amounts of bandwidth to distribute. There is no model that will support free access to quality content like the Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, or Wall Street Journal.
Music may be an exception to this. Bands may make enough money from touring to view albums as free advertising. And music production has come down so much in cost that there may be enough people creating music that the supply essentially prevents anyone from charging for it.
Nevertheless, I think Diller is absolutely right that we are moving away from the free model for many types of content. The free content to generate advertising model has been tried twice now, and it's failed miserably both times.
Do me a favor and call me when someone posts a home-made movie on YouTube that is, I dunno, let's say 10% as well-made, written, and acted as Star Trek.
People are willfully misrepresenting what Diller is saying. Diller is a media executive. He's not talking about Slashdot or your blog. Believe me, Diller doesn't give a shit if you keep posting reviews of local restaurants or Linux tips on your own web site, just like media executives 20 years ago wouldn't give a shit about a local church newsletter.
What Diller is talking about are things that are not so easily produced by "a thousand people putting out far more content for nothing." And the truth is, 1,000 people putting out content for nothing are still not going to produce Up!, or put out a daily newspaper with world-wide investigative reporting.
His point is that there are too many of those "premium content" services chasing too few advertising dollars to be free. Just like cable or print newspapers, we're going to need to move to a mixed advertising and fee-for-service model.
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."
He seems to be making the fundamental error of forgetting what internet content supply and demand look like. There is a near infinite (for practical purposes, anyway) number of content providers - original artists and authors, megacorporations, aggregators, bloggers, "pirates", amateur-gone-semi-pro porn stars, etc., because the internet enables us all to be publishers in some way. Also, each content provider has the ability to cross traditional geographical market boundaries easily, and serve a huge number of customers. The result is that although the signal-to-noise ratio may suck sometimes, there is such a broad amount of content and distribution is so trivial, that the supply side of the graph is completely out of whack - it approaches $0 for infinite content. Which oddly enough, is where most of us like it.
Traditional supply and demand only work in a market where there is a relatively limited number of players who control the product, and supply is limited by traditional manufacturing and distribution.
I am sure that in his position he sees clearly the cost of producing content that others consume essentially for free, but it does not automatically follow from that that many consumers in the market are willing to pay what he wants. Bitch-slapping your customers with rhetoric like his doesn't help either.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
You're paying for it right now. It's called an internet connection.
But any attempts to charge beyond that seemed to be doomed to failure.
Not necessarily true. Consider this possibility: ... Two types of ISPs remain: those that carry big media and those that carry indy media.
Gads, you are right! Such an eventuality would be sobering indeed. The Big Media fast lane, with instant access to high definition content, would have to be easy to navigate however. Maybe instead of web addresses, content could be indexed by simple numbers. Then the American Idle (I do like that term ;D) could consume the content by wielding a control device (instead of a keyboard and mouse) that does little more than change feeds to the next "channel" as it were.
Having such a content juggernaut fed by the gamut of Big Media would certainly make a person think twice before selecting a more complicated, open platform where all you could access are no-account indie content such as My Bank's Website, My Local Realtor's Listings, and Email From My Boss.
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
"Quality content" like the Christian Science Monitor? I've never read it, but I would be very skeptical of anything coming from that group. Maybe the editors just pray good articles will show up.
As you have stated, you never read it.
Pulling from Wikipedia:
* 1950, Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting: Edmund Stevens, For his series of 43 articles written over a three-year residence in Moscow entitled, "This Is Russia Uncensored."
* 1967, Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting: R. John Hughes, For his thorough reporting of the attempted Transition to the New Order in 1965 and the purge that followed in 1965-66.
* 1968, Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting: Howard James, for his series of articles, Crisis in the Courts.
* 1969, Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting: Robert Cahn, for his inquiry into the future of our national parks and the methods that may help to preserve them.
* 1978, Pulitzer Prize Special Citations and Awards, Journalism: Richard Strout, for distinguished commentary from Washington over many years as staff correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and contributor to The New Republic.
* 1996, Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting: David Rohde, for his persistent on-site reporting of the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.
* 2002, Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning: Clay Bennett
Aside from a requirement (tradition?) to run one religious article in the paper at the founder's request, it isn't a religious paper.
You may actually want to read it, as ignorance is never pretty.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
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.
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