Is there a thaw in 15 years of thinking that content on the web shall always be free? On Monday Nov. 16, All Things Digital's Kara Swisher posted a link to a chapter outtake from Ken Auletta's new book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It. Swisher wrote:
Ken Auletta says he decided to kill the chapter on things he's learned from covering the media and Google because it was "not organic to the book's narrative, and because I feared it [would] muddy the books purpose, casting it as a How-To book." He's put the 25 maxims on his website.
Here's an excerpt of one of the 25 maxims posted by Auletta here:
http://kenauletta.com/mediamaxims.html
A "Free" Web Is Not Always Free (by Ken Auletta)
The Web needs another revenue stream. The Internet grew to adulthood as a largely "free" medium but only by using the advertising-reliant model pioneered by radio and television broadcasting. As Stanford President Hennessy had told me, echoing a heretical thought I encountered more and more while reporting this book. "We should have made a micro-payment system work." Free works for Google search. It will work for other sites. But it does not work for most content businesses. Whether the right model is micro-payments, or subscriptions, or pay-for-services, or some combination of these is less important than making an effort to end advertising dependency.
Even Wired editor Chris Anderson, who once more forefully advocated that free was the perfect model (his 2009 book is titled, Free), has been intellectually honest and amended his position. Blaming the deep recession, Anderson appended a "Coda" chapter near the end of his new book in which he wrote that he now believes "Free is not enough. It also has to be matched with Paid." Eric Schmidt also shifted his view on charging for content on the Internet. "My current view of the world," he told me in April 2009, "is you end up with advertising and micro-payments and big payments based on" the nature of the audience.
The recession is one reason to seek another revenue stream. The other is the risk posed to journalism -- and to many Websites -- when content providers grant life-and-death power to advertisers. Advertisers will always want the most conducive setting for their ads; they want to sell products, and have perfectly good business reasons to be concerned with the environment in which their ads appear. The problem is that this impulse leads them to push for more "friendly" news: a senior network news executive said, "I've seen increasing incursions by advertisers into morning show content. Can the evening news be far behind?"
Of course, network news has in recent years made itself more of an inviting target for advertisers by allowing the morning shows and evening newscasts to become "softer" and more superficial. Likewise, it is as certain as a sunrise that advertisers will want tamer social networks and more predictable YouTube videos to accompany their products. To better target their ads, they also want to extract as much information about their potential customers as they can. But news outlets or Websites that share users, private information or allow themselves to be seen as bought and paid for will lose the trust of their customers. An additional revenue source will give them more leverage to resist.
-- END OF EXCERPT FROM AULETTA UNPUBLISHED BOOK CHAPTER --
The excerpt above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Comments