In the very early days of the Internet, some well-meaning fools misinterpreted a Steve Wosniak quote and started shouting from the rooftops, “Information wants to be free!” That simple phrase has since led to the degradation of the Internet and the downfall of quality, meaningful content.
No, information does not want to be free. Bad information and spam wants to be free, but good thought leadership and meaningful discourse wants to be bought and paid for. It’s common today to blame the decline of print journalism on the Internet, but it’s not the Internet’s fault. The Internet is merely another channel. The blame falls squarely on the “Internet wants to be free” crowd, whose silly cry influenced the dotcom boom, changed Internet publishing forever, and chased away career journalists, editors and publishers who legitimately felt that they should be compensated for their good work.
Where did it all go wrong? When the first online publications started to appear, we went with a free model instead of a subscription model, mistakenly believing that people shouldn’t pay for something they received online and setting up a consumer expectation that is doomed to fail. Then to make matters worse, not only could Internet publishers not charge a subscription fee, the “Information wants to be free” crowd did, and still does, get indignant when their favorite website decides to put up ad banners. Only the biggest publishers now dare to add a paywall, but if you’re not the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, any attempt at charging a subscription – which would be standard operating procedure for a print publication – once again causes this crowd to gear up their familiar rallying cry.
I was reminded of this phenomenon after seeing a recent conversation thread on the Good Men Project Facebook page, where people were complaining about the presence of advertisements. Worthwhile publications – including this one – take a tremendous amount of work to produce. The editors put in time – often full time – to ensure quality articles are always present and edited to comply with journalistic standards, and behind the scenes, there are of course, expenses. You may be able to host your personal blog on a five-dollar-a-month GoDaddy site, but a successful, high-traffic publication has greater and more expensive technical requirements. Consumers are demanding more from publishers, vendors and others with an online presence – they want faster servers, and will, for example, tend to abandon a website after about three seconds if it doesn’t appear. They want deeper and more intelligent information, richer graphics and video, and an engine on the back end that keeps everything humming.
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How are publishers paid to keep those speedy websites meeting increasingly higher expectations? Where does the money come from to manage servers, ensure backup and uptime guarantees? From two things: Advertising, and subscriptions. “Free” will not keep the words flowing to the virtual page.
What is strange about their argument is that, while this crowd wants everything at hand but doesn’t want to pay for it, they don’t make the same noise when it comes to seeing advertisements in their daily newspaper, or on their favorite television program. A major fallacy of their argument is their inconsistency.
It’s often said that the greatest thing about the Internet is the ease with which people can publish, and that’s true. At the same time, it’s also the worst thing about the Internet. The mindset needs to switch, and fast, to avoid an inevitable decline into meaningless, axe-grinding drivel. Want good information? Buy a subscription. Look at an advertisement, for God’s sake. It’s not going to hurt your eyeballs, and it may just result in a better flow of higher-quality content and an improved Internet.
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Photo credit: Getty Images
Very good brief analysis. As with just about everything I see today, the inconsistent arguments lead to a never ending death spiral.