October 16, 2009
Clay Shirky
The high price of charging for content
People will pay for content if it is necessary, irreplaceable, and unshareable. Businesses excited about the first five words of that sentence don’t understand how constraining the next seven are.
First, most content isn’t necessary. It’s optional. Traffic to the New York Times’s editorials fell precipitously during the days of their subscription service, TimesSelect. People wanted to read Paul Krugman and David Brooks, but they didn’t need to. Second, replaceability is in the eye of the beholder. Your coverage of the bailout may have different words than the competition’s does, but for the average reader, their reporting can be substituted for yours, and vice versa. Third, people like sharing—and dislike not sharing—but getting people to pay for content requires forbidding us from forwarding things we care about to family and friends.
(Link: McKinsey: What Matters: Will people pay for content online?)
