Shirky vs Brill: Will people pay?
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- With Australia media mogul Rupert Murdoch (he figures it’s time for net users to pay for what they currently get for free) in the background, “Yes, some consumers will fork out for some content,” says Steven Brill (righ), founder of Journalism Online, a company aimed at creating a new business model for online journalism.
But, “No, it’s too easy to obtain free content elsewhere on the Web,” says Clay Shirky, an associate new-media professor in the graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.
The two are pitted against each other in What Matters, “a new direction for McKinsey Publishing”.
At the conclusion of the debate (read the whole thing) “Journalism Online assumes that publishers’ failure to retain pricing power online is a readily reversible accident,” says Shirky, adding »»»
Were this true, any publication could start charging tomorrow, as JO’s technical solutions aren’t rocket science. Publishers can’t start charging tomorrow, of course, because their problem isn’t technology—it’s new and brutal competition. JO’s real offering isn’t tools, but collusion.
Adding fees online inhibits use while rewarding disloyalty. Deciding to aggravate only your most faithful users, alumni, or expats limits this trade-off but doesn’t change it. It’s no accident that the Big Three fee-for-content services—the FT, the Economist, and the WSJ – all reach price-insensitive audiences. The sad fact for most publishers is that there is no cartel large enough to make the average reader similarly price insensitive, and no user revenues that can offset competition from ad-supported and nonprofit publishers.
Says Brill »»»
This exchange demonstrates how last year the either/or debate has become. In fact, I agree completely with Clay’s analysis, so this isn’t much of a debate. We’re against the same pay walls he is. What we’re all about is providing our multidial Reader Revenue Platform™ to enable publishers to charge only their most engaged, addicted customers only for that which is, as Clay puts it so well, “necessary and irreplaceable.” As for his point about readers being able to share, he’s right, and we have a plan for that too.
And that is … ?
“Space constraints don’t allow me to describe it here in detail, but it has a lot to do with our sampling and viral marketing strategies,” he says.
Ahhhh. Viral marketing. 
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
get for free – Google vs Murdoch, Twitter and Facebook, November 11, 2009
What Matters – The Debate Zone: Will people pay for content online?, November 8that: “Rolando Webern’s on a victim’s is in disposing of, 2009
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