26 October, 2009 posted by Simone Holzapfel
ACCESS ALL AREAS
Recent talk of paying for internet content has sparked my interest.
When the first messages passed between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in 1969 - helped by the work of Leonard Kleinrock of MIT - did they ever imagine that it was the beginning of, perhaps, the most influential technological breakthrough of our lifetime? Probably not.
Did they ever envisage people having to pay to access content? I’d say, definitely not.
For me, the beauty of the internet lies in its accessibility. I don’t know about you but I find the Financial Review site www.afr.com and its subscription requirements frustrating; almost in opposition to the intent of the internet. To me, one of the benefits of most internet news sites and the reason for their popularity is that they are free to view.
Advertising on these sites (that provides a necessary revenue stream) doesn’t worry me, in fact I have been known to regularly ‘click-thru’, particularly on clever ads that interact and draw you in. But paying a subscription is another story - not because I’m particularly against the user pays principle - but, because it will limit the number of people that visit these news sites to access the latest news or opinion about current affairs and world events.
Without a doubt, the internet has not only changed the way we do business, it has also changed the way we communicate. The abundance of free-to-view news sites has been a boon to clever businesses that have used the internet to increase their reach. It is also the primary news source of a generation.
My guess is that paying for news sites will only decrease their usage by an already skeptical younger generation that is as switched on to accessing their current affairs and news through the computer as my generation was, and still is, switched on to the evening news.
To those of us tasked with communicating with them, paying for content will make a demographic that’s already hard to reach, even harder to engage in the future.
