As Peter Levinson points out, the NYTimes decision to wall off some of their sauciest content is a controversial one. Certainly among the blogeratti, it couldn’t be a popular decision, although Scobel, among others, was fairly non-ideological about the decision.

We’ve a little subscription model/online magazine experience at Catalyst - so the issue of whether and how to wall off content has been relentlessly discussed over here for the past year-and-a-half, if not longer. One of the major facets of the debate: choosing between business and ideology, or perhaps culture. Clearly, the idea that there’s too much content available for free to block any of it off is still a very powerful one (just look at the links Levinson points to). And both the actual amount of content and the 10-15 year old web cultural habit that says it should be accessible complicate business deciscion making. But the fact is that business models need to exist, and charging for content happens to be one of them. For better or worse.

The question is, how to quantify or assess the risk of driving people away, vs. getting a subset of them to pay? In the case of the Times, their acquisition of About.com has probably given them an excellent hedge. They had a high-traffic digital presence anyway - and with About’s visitor metrics and ad revenue, our guess is they’ll be well cushioned to absorb any loss of traffic on the editorial pages. And, given that those areas are marquee pages, we think they picked the right ones to wall off.

Not everyone has the luxury of such robust traffic, of course. But the bottom line is that people WILL pay to see half-decent content, especially if they are in the habit of finding it on your site and are not web intelligentsia. That is to say, if they don’t have an ideological bent that makes them a) hate for-pay content and b) develop the skills and mechanisms necessary to substitute or circumvent it. As the web gets bigger and more commercial, that audience will probably shrink. And as long as the price-point is right, the content is professional and traffic was established…you can opt for some version of for-pay content.

JF

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2005 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Media, Interaction Strategy.