"The experiment in paid content is over. No sale."
- AdAge
Slate, the Economist, CNN -- all have tried and ultimately rejected the paid content model. It all goes back to the idea that quality content is becoming less scarce -- and when a resource becomes more abundant, the value of owning that resource falls.
It costs money to erect walls, and it wastes time to market subscription models instead of marketing your quality content. Especially in a marketplace that is used to open information -- imagine going to a grocery store and instead of choosing from piles of produce, the grocer asks you to purchase blindly -- "buy this box, trust me, it's full of fresh produce" -- we buy a lot of our goods this way, but we've come to expect the experience of holding, smelling and seeing our fruits and vegetables. It's hard to imagine breaking the customer from this experience.
Abundance is an interesting concept for online content. It's not just that there's more quality content out there (which there is) it's also that its easier to find than ever before. You've got the search algo's themselves improving and then you have vertical communities creating recommendation engines a la Digg and Redditt. There is no "900 channels and nothing on" problem with the internet these days.
And all this time, online advertising is growing. In an earlier post, I cited a new study that estimates that online advertising revenue will exceed all other media by 2011. One reason many sites chose to drop paid models is because it opens the door to more pages and more content which can be ad-supported. For the heavy hitters, monetizing quality content has not been difficult.
But charging for content, the blind "buy this box" method, is clearly going the way of the Pony Express or the Electronic Pocket Dictionary -- as online advertising matures, this revenue model is just outdated. And we all know the cost of being outdated on the web ...
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