Another One Bites The Dust
It was a hundred pages, give or take, but I'll boil it down for you:
Nothing works, except The Wall Street Journal.
And now, that might be changing.
The Journal for years has been the exception that proves the rule, charging subscriptions for access to its online edition. Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire tyrant who just bought the paper, admitted he was rethinking the paper's position:
Rupert Murdoch's announcement this week that he expects to stop charging for access to the Wall Street Journal's Web site is the latest example of a publisher giving up on the subscription-based business model -- a significant shift in the evolution of online content…Even though a top executive at Dow Jones said that Murdoch was "jumping the gun," the mere fact that it's a serious consideration is telling. And it shows that the WSJ has to deal with the same Internet reality that the rest of us do.The shift toward free, ad-supported sites should prove to be more lucrative, said Murdoch, who plans to conclude his purchase of the Wall Street Journal before the end of the year. The Journal, with about 1 million subscribers, is one of a few publications that have made a business of selling content online. But the number of users could increase to 10 million to 15 million if the site were free, Murdoch told shareholders in a speech in Australia. That would mean the site could charge more to advertisers who want to reach that broader audience or any part of it.
If you want a stock update, a sports score, or a news account about Iraq, there is an infinite amount of sites a click away. The ubiquity of all this information on the web creates its own price structure. And the going rate for nearly all the information out there is $0.00.
The New York Times had to admit to this reality, when they decided to stop their TimesSelect gambit. The Economist had to give up the ghost. Slate tried the subscription model, before it realized it just wasn't going to happen. And now the Journal is wondering aloud whether it should change its strategy, even if it means -- as Reuters reported – taking a $63 million hit in the short term.
So next time you get frustrated at the weird or irritating ads that pop up or move around, or have to enter in a zip code at a website, or notice that a word or two in the story is sponsored by an advertiser, remember that's the price you pay for paying nothing at all. And that the people who run MediaLand are still trying to figure out how to make this Internet thing work, a decade after I put 100 pages into trying to do so.