“Skeptics may ask why anyone would pay for something that was elsewhere available at no charge, but that’s precisely what they said when Steve Jobs launched the iTunes Music Store, competing with the free offerings on Napster. We’ve seen how that turned out. If the Kindle payment architecture takes off, it may ultimately lead the way toward the standardized micropayment system whose nonexistence has caused so much turmoil in the news business — a system many people wish had been built into the Web’s original architecture, along with those standardized page locations.”
— My good friend @adamholz and I had a spirited discussion in DC this past weekend about the future of print media and specifically how it can and will be monetized. While we agreed that “online presence” in itself is insufficient, we had different views as to how to get people to pay for traditional print media content. I am not a fan of advertising models outside of search or local/niche content sites (what ad should be served to someone reading about the rise in piracy on cnn.com, cap’n crunch?). My hypothesis is that people will pay for premium and/or local/niche content, and as such, content providers need to charge for this. Any other content (such as current events) should be given away as a loss leader since its cheaply created, easily replicated and widely available. There will be a flight to quality (I am sorry folks but there is a reason cnn.com is second in popularity only to Ashton Kutcher) and those who manage their costs (do you really need someone at the Mozambique desk?) and find a way to charge for content (micropayments? see quote above) will emerge victorious.
