Paying for Internet content

Has Internet killed the newspaper star? With publications like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Christian Science Monitor shuttering their print operations and moving to web only distribution, the answer would seem to be “yes.”

Newspapers of course painted themselves into a corner when they embraced the World Wide Web. By not charging for their content, they quickly devalued their online presence, at least in monetary terms. Then again, the few that did charge right out of the gate found few takers. What had worked so well for broadcasters for over eighty years, hasn’t getting the job done.

Eric Clemons is a Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Guest posting on TechCrunch, he argues that
“pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites.”

Perhaps the genie is already out of the bottle, but it seems that if people are expecting the message, the failure rate should decline. As a child of network television, I expect commercials. When I watch reruns of Star Trek, The Twilight Zone or Battlestar Galactica on line, I don’t bristle at watching an ad during what were the normal broadcast commercial breaks. It probably helps that my computer is a bit aged, and that trying to skip the spots goofs up the stream. But again, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to watch a total of 4 or 5 commercials in exchange for seeing the episode on demand and, otherwise, free.

On USA Today’s website I’m less forgiving for some reason. Click on a headline, and before the story pops up, there is often an ad. Oddly, you can click to close it and move on. Guess what I do? If I had to sit through, say, 15 seconds of an ad where I didn’t have the option of skipping, I’d wait patiently, probably even look at the advert and then read the content I was originally after.

There’s probably loads of research to show that people simply won’t do what I do, but the alternative isn’t very attractive. I hate signing up for every little thing on the web. It’s annoying. Usernames, passwords, “tell us about yourself”---bugger off, as our friends in the U.K. say. Couldn’t you just show me a nice ad instead? Even though we all hate ads, we sure do talk about the good ones. Sometimes we even go and seek them out on YouTube.

I don’t want to pay for Facebook. However, I’ll trade a half hour of Facebook time for a one minuet ad. They can even target it, I won’t be mad at ‘em. I’m a Cleveland Browns fan, so have the NFL Network run a spot that reminds me about their exclusive Thursday night game. Or on on-line music site can remind me about an upcoming release from one of the bands I’ve become a fan of on Facebook.

A lot of the debate out there is over whether advertising as we have known it can survive on the web, or can make money for people and their websites. As an individual consumer I say “yes,” but I’m just a guy north of 40, and the young people may have different notion.

By the way, here’s something fun. A report 1981 KRON San Francisco report on what the prospect of reading your morning newspaper on your home computer.