Perfect Situation… For Some, Anyway

It is lamentable that George Santayana’s statement “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is forever associated with the madman Jim Jones, who had it posted above his throne at Jonestown.  There is much truth in those words.  As a bunch of people are about to discover.

Again.

Yesterday’s New York Times included an article about a new Internet start-up named Journalism Online LLC.  Its goal is to provide a single portal through which multiple media entities can offer their wares for a fee.  There would be some free content, but to go further the visitor would pay a fee.  The amount of free versus paid content and price for the latter would be determined by the provider.  The founders are talking big about this being the perfect situation; a one-stop shop where depending on the number and nature of content providers the visitor will have a multitude of high flying sites all conveniently located in one place.  Pony up and you get all the goodies.  Brilliant, right?

Oh, so wrong, so wrong.

I mentioned yesterday the rapidly diminishing amount of advertising dollars being spent on blogs.  It’s even worse for online media outlets, particularly those who depend exclusively or overwhelmingly on ad revenue for their existence as the latest round of layoffs at Yahoo attest.

More traditional media outlets, particularly those who have been less than stellar in grasping how things are done online with its demand for fluid content, have tried several times to carry over at least part of the old school philosophy.  Okay, the corporate thinking goes, time to examine this business model.  People subscribe and/or buy individual copies of newspapers and magazines.  You don’t expect to get them for free.  So why should we give away our content on the Internet?  We’ll charge a subscriber fee.  No problem.

Uh, problem.

When consumers have a choice between paying for Product A and getting Product B for free, Product A had better have something worthwhile to offer Product B can’t touch.  There are very few exclusive entities on the Internet.  Don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for that industry newsletter?  Look around.  Chances are good to excellent the same information is available elsewhere for nothing more than a mouse click.  News, sports, opinion?  Sure, you might like a particular writer whose work is on a paid site.  So wait a few minutes.  Invariably someone will either reprint their latest work wholesale or casually drop a note on how to read it for free.  The Associated Press and others can bellow and bluster all they wish about intellectual property and copyrights, but the facts are the moment you put it online someone is going to grab it with or without permission.  You may be able to put the clamps on the most egregious offenders.  But you’ll never stop it from happening.  Ever.  (As an aside, this is why my book isn’t available in digital form.  I can’t afford to give it away.)  It’s not right to steal the work of others.  However, it happens.  The mindset of how everything on the Internet should be equally available to all at no charge isn’t going anywhere.

All right then, the thinking may go.  We’ll load it with ads so we can make at least something off of all this.  Nice idea, but blissfully ignorant of the facts.  A whole lot of us use Firefox as our browser.  What’s the first add-on we install?  Adblock Plus.  How come?  We hate online ads interfering with our looking at different sites.  Use Internet Explorer or Safari or something else?  Every browser has some form of add-on available for blocking ads.  And you expect people to buy ads why?  So they can be the first one on the blocked?  The only method of online advertising that is in any fashion effective is when a static page is presented, and this is a method most prefer to avoid because it takes longer for the user to load.

Basically, no matter who or what you are if you put it on the Internet in any form you’re: 1)  giving it away; 2) far more likely than not to not realize any revenue from it; and 3) better accept these as part of the deal because they are not going to change regardless of your preferences in the matter.  Traditional media is not only locking the barn door after the horse has escaped — again — they’re trying to decide what color it should be painted.  The barn, not the horse.  It prefers to run natural.

As the blogging evangel says, blog from and for the heart.  Not the bank account.  Which is well nigh impossible anyway.  The Internet is a perfect situation for those whose interest is in caring and sharing.  Everyone else?  Not so much.

P.S.  Speaking of perfect situation…

[video http://www.diecast-dude.com/gac/weezer_perfect_situation.flv nolink]