Stephen Downes writes an excellent article on why pay-for-content business models aren’t going to work on the web. Basically, he argues, the cost someone is willing to bear for even such an excellent daily newsletter as NextDraft is so ridiculously low that there is no way it could ever pay. Using some pretty interesting economic reasoning, Downes puts a value on content such as the NextDraft newsletter at approximately US$0.05 per YEAR! His advice: keep your day job and — instead of looking for direct economic benefits from the newsletter or blog or other type of website — concentrate on the related benefits. Become known as an expert in your field and generate speaking fees. Develop your blogging into a book. Use it as a reference when you jump into the world of professional journalism.
One of Downes’ points really struck me as being in accord with what I’ve been saying to anyone who’ll listen (especially my mother, who’s first question about my blog was, “Are you getting paid for it?):
[The] major issue isn’t the fact that I won’t pay. It is that you are by no means alone.There are hundreds of thousands of blog writers (half a million, according to a recent (free) MSNBC article. On top of that, hundreds of thousands more authors of various sorts, including university professors (each of whom thinks he has the one best way to teach calculus, and that the would ought to pay for it), politicians (who will now and always write for free), sports fans, pundits and consultants, and more. heck, there are even software programs out there that will do much of what you already do…
When cable TV first started, many of the channels we watch today were offered on an ,em>a la carte basis. But cable operators and cable channels soon realized that people weren’t going to pay monthly fees of US$10 for every single channel, so they packaged them into things like “Basic Cable”, “Family Cable”, etc.
I get about 100 channels and I pay about $US40/month for my cable service. Assuming US$10/month for overhead and the basic connection and taxes, my package works out to about US$0.30/month/channel. And this is for information and entertainment which I probably couldn’t find elsewhere. There is no software program (that I know of) which can gather all the entertainment and original content of Animal Planet, and yet I am paying less than US$4.00/YEAR for this programming.
Subscribing to Salon would be wonderful. It would be nice to read the non-rabid-right-wing parts of The Wall Street Journal online. I already pay for the New York Times crossword puzzles. I’d love to drop a couple of bucks here and there into the donation boxes of the dozens of blogs i read regularly. How much of the content in the blogs is original content and how much is links to other content? The commentary is the value, I know, but how much is an opinion worth?
What about if someone put together a package of newsletters, blogs, ezines, games, music and entertainment and offered it as a package deal? How do you think that would work?
