Paid Content on the Net? Not if the Content's News

PAID CONTENT ON THE NET? NOT IF THE CONTENT'S NEWS
[SOURCE: AdAge, AUTHOR: Nat Ives and Abbey Klaassen]
Slate, The Economist, CNN and, maybe soon, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Paid content on the Web doesn't seem to work. Even those that still plan to charge for content recognize that the free model has its benefits. This March, Slate rival Salon hiked prices on both its paid-subscription plans, but not because it saw paid content as the way forward. It raised rates the most for its ad-free subscription and raised them less for a subscription tier that includes some ads. The appeal of charging for online content is understandable -- doing so helps fight cannibalization of print editions and supplements online-ad sales that can't match the rates achieved in print. It's also nice for advertisers to know that a consumer loves a publisher's site enough to pay for it. None of that is compelling enough to support paid content in most situations, said Jeff Marshall, senior VP-digital managing director at Starcom/Pixel. "From a marketer perspective, the big reason for moving something like TimesSelect or Dow Jones is you potentially create greater scale for advertisers, and they want as much scale as possible," he said. "Fortune 1000 companies want to move a lot of products, and the more people you can reach in desirable audiences, the better."
http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=119836

* Fee content vs. free content
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0814/p09s01-coop.html