Would you pay for news online? Should you be required to pay for news online? Why are the only business models for companies online revolve around advertising?
I've pondered about these questions and it's cracked on the history and formation of the Internet as a whole.I mean I agree the Internet is powerful tool because of these ease of use to access and find information.However that access isn't free,in proportion to the amount of data we access online, no one person could afford to pay except the wealthy.It's like how the airline industry eventually was to bring down cost of flight and making it more affordable.However by privitizing the airline industry did it really help the airline.Airlines still to this day lose more money then they take in on a per customer basis.I can imagine that the phone companies and ISPs lose even more.Just think about the costs to operate these vast networks across the globe.You would almost think that a company like Verizon or AT&T market value would be in the hundreds of billions right? Wrong? They're all trumped by Google a portal that at it's simplest form allows an individual to locate information on the web more efficiently.Thanks to companies like Google,Yahoo,AOL,Lycos and Netscape the business model of freemium has been exploited.The sad part is that Google has to advertise just to be able to operate there vast empire.I mean just think for a moment if the first search portal whomever created it charged you a fee to access a partcular search? Wouldn't that be outrageous? Or would it really be? Remember that ancient newspaper that we all used back in the early 90's wasn't there a charge for your local paper or even your Sunday paper?As a matter of fact my Sunday paper costed more then the weekly paper what an outrage.To think that just on Sunday they have the nerve to charge me more money.But then again look at the amount of advertisements were included in that Sunday paper.. Hmm so I get to thinking that newspapers in it's purest form are portals of information in which I paid a set daily fee to access. Bingo,so fastforward 10 years later and the Internet comes along and here's Yahoo and Google which really are like The New York Times or USA Today because there portals used to access information.So let's see if Google charged me $1.00 a day and $2.00 on Sunday to access unlimited search that would be reasonable.Guess what and because they charge me a set fee the quality of the news I receive would be better an my pages would be unendated with ads! Hmm sounds like a fair tradeoff oh and what about all that indexing they do.Those spiders and advanced algorithyms all search the web to bring you organized information? How do they get all those billions of pages from a word you search? Well let's see I can't imagine they get all that for free or do they? Well sadly to say they do becuase in the early days of website design and creation of these pages creators didn't realize the value of information.Just the same reason why newspaper needed to charge you a fee to read there papers.Website designers and developers should have focused on the focal point of there work which is there work.That the information itself is more important than the access of information.I mean afterall if I had inside information that the steelers would win the superbowl and I made bets on that information.Wouldn't you be willing to pay me for that information or to have that same viable information?
Sadly to say the early founders didnt get it! Well that's why te whole freemium model exists in the first place.Companies like Google and Yahoo and others don't place a high value on the creation of that information and since they can access it for free they to missedout on a huge opportunity to capitalize on that same very business model that could have transformed the Internet as a whole.People pay for information that's why the newspaper and magazine industries thrived in the first place.So why wouldn't you think that just because you have a new medium to access information that people wouldn't pay for that? It's quite simple and all these companies overlooked and that's why there all so dependant on advertising for revenue.