Chairman MaoXian had a thought provoking post today linking to an article about newspapers and free web access. The gist of the original link seemed to be that newspapers are losing paid circulation to free web access of their content. The Chairman, (I think) disagrees and thinks they only get more readers with free web content. I guess I disagree with the specifics, but basically agree with the general point. I do agree with the Chairman that paid web access is a pain (I'm a cheap bastard too) and short-sighted, but I suspect it does cost the papers paid subscribers. I mean, look at the numbers presented for the NY Times--their subscribers are down, in a country/world with ever-expanding population and resources. However, the issue may not be that people are deciding, do I pay for the paper NYT or read it online. No, I think the larger issue is that there are so many free sources of information, most of them online, that people think why should I pay for it?
By and large, I think people want nuggets of information; they don't want the NYT or the WSJ per se, they want the nuggets. If they can get the same nuggets for free, why pay? I think on a small scale, a paper loses paid readers when they put their content out for free, but they have no choice, really; whether they charge or not, they may be losing "eyeballs" to some other nugget provider. It's like when AOL tried to persist in their proprietary content as the internet grew; eventually, they figured out there was just too much good free stuff out there, that nobody really cared about their unique AOL stuff, and so they just became an access provider, really.
The challenge for newspapers (and everybody, really, including me and the Chairman) is with all the ways to get free nuggets, how do you distinguish yourself so that people gotta have your nuggets?
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