Charging for content will be a huge failure for the media

More and more news sites are thinking about charging for content. The newspaper industry is looking at dwindling circulation and assuming that their growing online readership will provide the path to profitability. They might be right, but they are heading in the wrong direction.

Online news sites benefit from type-in traffic and links from sites like Yahoo, Google, and the Drudge Report. Once sites require subscriptions, those links will disappear, along with the resulting traffic. What they’ll be left with is a small group of loyal readers willing to pay a reasonable fee for news that they could readily read at one of several free web sites. Let’s also remember that those links provided by news aggregators brought in visitors who clicked ads. When the traffic goes down, the ad revenue will probably follow. After all, do you want to advertise on a site that isn’t viewed much in comparison to its peers? » read more