Reading the debate about the appropriate price of online content – while it's still free.

To Pay, or Not to Pay

The debate rages on: should we have to pay for online content? If you’ve been watching the internet, you know that global media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been threatening to put a price tag on all his online newspaper and TV content. However, a few months ago he was overshadowed by the Associated Press’s plan to introduce technology that will tag and track AP content across the web.

"Magic Beans"

Depending on who you believe and how willing you are to generalize, AP’s so-called “Protect, Point, Pay” registry represented a typically negative reaction to Google’s, bloggers’, and news aggregators’ so-called theft of content and ad revenue from major media outlets (a point supported by a leaked AP document summarizing the reasons for and goals of the registry); a menace to internet democracy; a bag of “magic beans”; a joke; or all of the above.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Online News

In what could be called an autopsy, given the reception of AP’s proposition, new-media groups Poynter.com and Nieman Lab both examined the model put forward by AP and re-emerged with the same answer: some parts of it will work and others won’t.

Media columnist and professor Jeff Jarvis, a staunch supporter of free content, suggests that newspapers looking for paid options are ignoring the rapidly shifting realities of the user-dominated news market. Jarvis suggests that newspapers and news services employ “hyperdistribution” – his word for a news model that is wide-reaching yet targeted, embeddable, socially engaged, and uses API to forward both content and ad revenues – and recommends that they focus less on preserving existing models and more on finding new, viable ones. In that spirit, the venture firm YCombinator has taken the initiative of seeding ideas to new news services and offering to fund whichever company finds the most innovative business model for them.

What the News Outlets are Doing

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette came up with a compromise. It is launching a new website, parallel to its existing, free site, that offers all the content they currently provide plus special web exclusives – including a custom social platform – for paying subscribers. It fills some of the holes in AP’s paid-content model, but without further detail, one anticipates the worst: “It’s just like Facebook, only you pay for it!”

But Google trumped the Post-Gazette: On September 9, 2009 it proposed a “premium content ecosystem” where readers would pay for subscriptions across multiple news sites, syndication on third-party sites, accessibility to search, and a range of payment options including small fees for individual articles. As Google says, “‘open’ need not mean free.”

On the beat: @jeffjarvis, @jayrosen_nyu, @david_a_eaves, @mathewi, @rhh, Clay Shirky, @NiemanLab, @romenesko