When I first got the internet at home 12 or so years back, I remember the Actrix ISP guy telling me to make the most of it because, sooner rather than later, we’d all have to pay to view anything on the web.
Today, thankfully, I’m still waiting for that, and savvy businesses are making more and more online stuff free - many getting rich doing it.
Wired editor Chris Anderson for one firmly believes things are only going to get freer on the internet. In his new book, Free: the Future of a Radical Price, Anderson says, “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.”
Tomorrow, though, the National Business Review starts to charge for ‘premium’ content on its website. The move comes as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation also ponders widespread charges for reading its news websites. So far, reportedly, it has more than one million paid up subscribers to its Wall St Journal online service. Which way, if at all, things will tip is still pretty unclear.
And will this trend extend beyond the grumpy old men of newspapers? It appears unlikely. The free internet has been a huge tool for smart PR campaigns (think the best job on the world) using free content and, of course, for the free spread of ideas and thought, in general.
UPDATE: I visited the NBR site Friday morning. Most of the top stories have Subscriber content next to them, and you must sign-on and pay to access them. Did I do this? No. Do I miss not getting the content? Yes. Is the content crucial for my work or life? No. Has the website now become a bit unhelpful for me? Yes. Does it make the site less worth visiting? Yes. Will the site lose a visitor and NBR advertisers a potential customer? Looks like it.
Continuing our look at plans for pay-perview internet: New Zealand had its own version of a pay-per-view internet with the NZ Herald’s premium service a couple of years back.
It reached the level of silliness where even freelance columnists who wrote for the paper were not able to access their own work online unless they paid to see it. That premium service quickly died a death and the site is now totally open again.
For many years New Zealand news website Scoop has provided a free service for anyone to post media releases online, now the National Business Review has started offering a similar service - the Horse’s Mouth - for corporate and political party releases.
The good thing about both services is that the media releases go online unedited letting your message reach the world as you intended it to. Both sites also have good search engine visibility, so your media release gets a good headstart for people searching online.
NBR publisher Barry Colman said the move would allow a free flow of information from which readers could draw their own conclusions. “Some of these releases would otherwise head straight for the can in a newsroom, or be edited down,” he said.
Getting your company mentioned in the media and then having those mentions filter through the internet to be found by potential customers via search engines has, for many years, been a big part of getting company messages seen and heard.
News Corporation controls much of NZ’s media and has a huge influence around the world. Let’s hope a very useful channel for publicity is not shut off to the internet masses in favour only of people who can afford to pay to view.
How do you find and track yourself or your business online? How do you manage your online reputation?
With the online world a key environment for spreading PR messages, it is essential to be able to track those messages as well as their responses and any other mentions and conversations about your business.
And this tool — uberVU — is so new it hasn’t even had its public beta release yet! But it’s already getting good press. It tracks conversations wherever they go on the web and then let you reply to, and manage, them from one place.
Now that sounds very promising: convergence of social media , we need that.
