Anyone under the age of about 25 must find the idea of paying for anything on the Internet bizarre. As most of us know, once something has been published, it’ll be available in some form on some website or other for free. Which is why despite various attempts at making people pay for news, Web-based news sites have to be free.

When the Web first started, most things had to be paid for, unless the site was a completely amateur effort. But as organizations realized the power of the Internet and how huge traffic could generate huge advertising income, things started to change, with many professional products and services available for free.

Most news websites follow this model, using advertising to pay their staff rather than a subscription-based revenue model. Even newspapers which started out using subscriptions models have slowly realized the nature of the Web means this structure is doomed to failure.

But that doesn’t stop some people in the business still resenting the fact that they’re giving something away for free, and as Shane Richmond on The Telegraph Blog points out, some dinosaurs still regret not taking action ten years ago that may have resulted in the pay model becoming the norm.

Rob Grimshaw is the managing director of FT.com, the Web arm of The Financial Times, one of the few newspapers to stick to a subscription-based model. While it may work for the FT due to them offering in-depth coverage of one particular aspect of news – the economy, money, and personal finance – that doesn’t mean it would work for newspapers as a whole.

Andrew Rosenthal, who edits the New York Times editorial page, is filled with regret that newspapers and the like didn’t team up years ago before the idea of charging for content became a big no-no. He recently commented:

Maybe ten years ago we [as in, many newspapers and other content sites] could have done something – held hands and jumped off the cliff together. We didn’t. It’s the biggest mistake we ever made.

But as Richmond rightly points out, that point of view assumes that people wouldn’t still choose to get their news somewhere else. Unless every single site is part of a huge monopoly, and no-one breaks out of that to go solo, there will always be a free and alternative way to access news. Once a story is out there, then anyone can pass it on to someone else.

There will always be newspapers and organizations trying to enforce subscription-based models on its readers but the Internet is now too huge and has too many different voices speaking to ever really make a site which charges people for its news and views serious money.

Related:

Entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 11:37 pm under Internet, Opinion.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
Stumble It!