Adding Fees and Fences on Media Sites

This article is interesting in that the traditional media assumes that it is the only game in town (or the best game in town) and that if it charges for its content, people will pay for it. I think that line of thought is flawed to the extent that the public is frequently willing to settle for "good enough" content instead of paying for content. WP v. Britannica is a great model of this. Everyone agrees that Britannica is a professional encyclopedia, but they charged people for their content. WP on the other hand is recognized as not being authoritative or even highly accurate, yet it is free. At the end of the day 95%+ of people looking for content from an encyclopedia have found WP good enough for their needs and don't feel compelled to pay for Britannica's more accurate content. I suspect that if places like the NYT close their content, people will simply substitute free alternatives like the Huffington Post, Breitbart, etc instead of paying for the NYT. Yes, the NYT may be more accurate, better written, etc, but the other sources are good enough for most people reading the news when they wake up in the morning.

I also suspect this will drive more people to WP, as despite WP:NOT#NEWS, it still is generally current enough to take the place of the traditional media that appears in Google News searches. Information may or may not want to be free on its own, but people will almost always prefer free over paying for non-critical material.

You really think that, do you? Could I take a look at your data and the survey methodology?

I have some anecdotal information that suggests 61% of people looking for content from an encyclopedia have found WP insufficient for their needs.

This Hitwise report was where I recalled that statistic from. Also, I suppose it is a definition of terms. I've said that 95%+ of people have found it good enough that they don't pay for Britannica (as that would then increase Britannica's market share). You are saying that 61% of people have found WP insufficient for their needs. Just because something is insufficient (I found the train I took to work to be insufficient as a means of transportation because of its low quality, expense, etc, but not to the point of being willing to drive the distance) does not mean people are not using it, rather that they are not totally satisfied using it.

I think you could say the lack of decent competitors is evidence enough that people are satisfied with Wikipedia.

That's fantastic. I'll travel back in in time now to 1993, and let Comcast know that its lack of any paid subscription TV competitors was evidence enough that people were satisfied with Comcast.

Additionally, please give Microsoft a call in 2005 and let them know that their 97% market share of the operating system market is evidence enough that people are satisfied with Microsoft. Also, let them know in 2004 that their stranglehold on the Internet browser market is almost unanimous.

I think Congressional re-election rates persistently stay above 90%, so we'd better count American legislators, too, among those esteemed bodies that people are satisfied with.

Comcast, Microsoft, Congress, and dear old Wikipedia.

Some great company you're keeping there, Messrs. McBride and Bisanz.

"Cable television has been an exception, thriving on subscriber fees". I'm not sure why the "AOL model" (effectively the cable television model) never caught on - flat monthly premiums for gobs of exclusive content. I do think that's the only model that has a chance of working beyond the niche.

And even those niches will probably slowly fade away. Most recently, shares of TomTom sunk as Google started providing turn-by-turn GPS navigation services for free on the Verizon Droid (*). Niche content providers need to be careful - grow your market too big and you'll get usurped by "free".

(*) Now ported to the G1. I tried it out just two days ago and it worked well. Too bad the OpenStreetMap project has its head up its ass and the content was only free as in beer. But hey, I'm sure MBisanz MZMcBride would say the lack of decent competitors is evidence enough that people are satisfied with "free as in beer", right?

This New York Times op-ed that appeared yesterday goes to the heart of the problem. It doesn't mention Wikipedia, but Google is using Wikipedia to cover its tracks. The hype level would be all too obvious in Google's top results if Google wasn't able to throw in a couple of Wikipedia links.

For Google, Wikipedia is akin to a conspiracy coverup. Wikipedia is too stupid to care; it lacks any incentive to control its own rankings on Google because Wikipedia is myopic and self-centered. In fact, Wikipedia is so stupid that it believes that all the attention lavished on it by Google is evidence of Wikipedia's high quality.

I didn't say the lack of competitors is evidence that people are satisfied, I just said that people will prefer even inferior free things to paying for superior products. The TomTom example you give will probably play out that way. I don't use either product, but I suspect TomTom has a tech support number, a warranty, etc that make is a superior product to Google's product, but since one is free, people will prefer that, even if they have to resort to Googling forums for tech support answers instead of calling a trained technician.

I must enter a message to post!

Oops. Mistaken attribution fixed above.



I highly doubt TomTom has any real warranty on the software. A tech support number maybe, but in my experience tech support numbers which are included in standard packages are rarely useful. In the case of Google vs. TomTom, it may not be so yet, but give it a year or two and Google's navigation service will likely be both free and superior.



Depending on the magnitudes, almost everyone. But my main response to that was that, so far, cable television has been a major exception. A couple years ago I even caved in and subscribed to cable television myself (after going about 8 years without it), and outside of my business I'm usually willing to put up with a much inferior product for the sake of it being free (both no cost and open source).

Yeah, well - the truth is probably somewhere in the middle - the high google rankings are evidence of nothing more and nothing less than that everyone links to it all the time, with a side issue of strictly nofollowing any* outward links. Of course, what the people who think it's evidence of high quality are ignoring is that everyone links to it because it's the lowest common denominator (along with it being a vicious cycle - people google search for something, then post the link because it's what came up).

*except to Wikia

The interwebs, like most all aspects of our lives, is doomed to be governed by evil corporate overlords (did I say overlords?! I meant protectors). Google, to my eyes, is the lesser of two weevils. Of course they've done some shitty things, transforming Wikidpedia into the deathstar of knowledge not the least of them. But would the nets, or society in general, really be better off if Micro$hyte or BoozeCorp were in charge instead...I think not.

I would say that the issue is that there is no single competitor to Wikipedia (Britannica comes close, but can't match the breadth of Wikipedia). Within their specific competencies, all of Wikipedia's competitors are trouncing it. Within my own areas of interest and expertise, for example, I own a library of several thousand volumes that I've been building since high school. I would never go to Wikipedia for things I can find in my own collection as it is far inferior, and I'm more than willing to pay quite a lot of money for high-quality information. Similarly, I subscribe to 4 newspapers (and a half-dozen current events magazines) and I would never go to Wikipedia to read about current events. I'm willing to pay handsomely to be able to hold high quality news and analysis in my hands.

On the other hand, if I want to look up some pop culture fact, I'm going to go to Wikipedia. I'm not sure if there are high-quality non-free reference works for pop culture, but even if there were, there's no chance I would pay for them. I'll also find myself on Wikipedia from time to time reading articles about things that lie far outside my normal interests. Other people, though, may care a great deal about pop culture and pay for whatever it is that keeps you current in that area (gossip magazines, perhaps?) while they couldn't care less about the same information I'm willing to pay for, so they wind up looking at Wikipedia articles that I would never even consider looking at. If there were, however, a non-free reference work that really covered, in considerable detail, just about every topic, I would certainly pay for it.

Sadly, Wikipedia does come closer than anything else I can think of to providing the sum of all human knowledge. In any particular area, there are countless works better than Wikipedia; there is (almost by definition) always a source superior to Wikipedia for whatever you're particularly interested in. The problem, though, is that these sources lack breadth. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy will tell me a lot more about philosophy than Wikipedia will, but it's not going to tell me anything about volcanoes. The Encyclopedia of Volcanoes will tell me a lot more about volcanoes than Wikipedia, but it won't say much about Descartes, and so on and so forth. If I'm interested in chemical warfare, I'll probably buy Eric Croddy's excellent Weapons of Mass Destruction: An Encyclopedia of Worldwide Policy, Technology, and History, which is undoubtedly the best general-purpose work for chemical and biological warfare, but what if I want to look something up about snakes? I don't own The New Encyclopedia of Snakes, and frankly I'm not even in a place to evaluate whether that's a good work or not, so I may well end up on Wikipedia.

Imagine, though, that some one found a way to join together The New Encyclopedia of Snakes, the Encyclopedia of Volcanoes, the Encyclopedia of Gangs, the Encyclopedia of Judaism, and all of the 167,329 various encyclopedias listed on WorldCat. The result would be fantastic. It would blow Wikipedia out of the water, and I'll be willing to pay a princely sum for a subscription. I'm sure that University Libraries would also be willing to pay fantastic amounts for access to such a work in electronic form. It would be hard to wade through the mess of copyrights to make something like this happen, but I think if someone like OUP, CUP, or PUP wanted to make it happen, they could. And if they did, Wikipedia would die. Material far superior to Wikipedia is already out there, it's just a matter of putting it all together.

The degradation of encyclopedias is bad enough, but the degradation of journalism is much, much worse. Encyclopedias rely on underlying sources. A bad free encyclopedia does not prevent the development of those sources. The most important aspect of a free press is investigative reporting. This is what separates the press from other forms of mere speech. This is expensive, difficult and sometimes dangerous work. Not just grand Al Qaeda/War Correspondent type reporting but even local government mismanagement and police brutality issues suffers when social media displaces reporting. The development of content consisting of rehashes and opinion is no substitute for reporting but it cheap and fits in well with a "free kulture" model. Whoever pays for thework of reporting is apt to take a financial beating under current practices. This is made all the worse by a public becoming more and more accustomed to cherry-picked news that reinforces their political/social viewpoints. They might not even notice that end of fact based based reporting for a good long while so long as the talking heads keep agreeing with them.

You might be an exceptional consumer. I don't know where the laffer curve would peak in terms of the end-user's cost per-publication-per-year for this unified omni-pedia subscription. I suspect most publishers would take anything less than several dollars (per reader) as an insult, yet that a large enough fraction of a cent (per reference work) would alienate most readers if they are obligated to purchase the entire package.

Maybe somewhere between these points they could compromise and make it only accessible to the stinking rich. Who'd have thought general knowledge could be such a niche market?

Besides, this would be too much information in the classical sense; one could never get their money's worth. Even if I did have all this at my fingertips I'd die before I finish reading the parts I'm interested in. I suppose I could leave pirated copies to my grandkids but hell, copyright might expire before they finish picking up where I left off.

You would probably enjoy The Machine Stops.

My thoughts are that the Newspapers, etcetera have realized that online is not a fad, and that print material is generally going the way of the dodo.

However, they did not learn the lessons of the music industry and filesharing.

"Pay" cannot compete with "Free".

Murdoch et all are about to learn that.

Good Grief, you think he makes the Big Bux peddling papers?

He makes the Big Bux controlling the beehivior of hooman bees.

Jon

The internet could have been a goodsend to print news. The lesson of file sharing is that the music industry is not about selling plastic discs. Nor is print news about about bleaching wood pulp and then staining it with ink. It is about collecting and disseminating reliable information. Paper print was a tremendous burden in production and distribution. This could have been taken off the backs of print media. Enter the Free Kulture and the godsend turns into a death notice.

But you'll never know because all reliable information will go black. Maybe some blogger might guess it. Some other blogger will blame Zombies. All the same.

Rupert Murdoch needs to seriously die.
Where's Peter Cushing with a wooden stake when we really need him?!

Billions of iTunes downloads disagree with that. "Pay" can sometimes compete with "Free", at least to some extent.

Rupert Murdoch is already in Blood-Sucker Heaven.

Jimbo's wiki-parade of fly-eaters is lining up the sheep for him — and he can hardly wait to sink his fangs into them.

Jon

Well, you wouldn't need to actually have all those encyclopedias. Naturally, I haven't read the titles of most of them, but I imagine that many of them are roughly duplicates and so on. If, as I suggest, a major academic publisher, created an encyclopedia/database by combining the titles it already publishes (in the case of OUP, this would amount to several thousand specific encyclopedias), then it wouldn't have to pay much of anything (depending on its arrangements with the authors). The pricing could be done in a variety of ways. University libraries, hospitals, research institutes, law firms, etc. already pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for important databases (Lexis Nexis, NewsBank, Proquest, some of the fancier Thomson Business databases), and institutional subscriptions to a resource like the one I'm describing could easily command a similar price.

As for individuals, the number of people willing to pay extreme prices for unlimited use might be on the low side, but I think that (and yes this number is largely imagined) there would be a substantial market in the $100 per year range, and the publisher could make a profit at that level. Furthermore, articles could be sold individually or you could sell one day access packs, etc. Who knows, maybe an ad-supported model would even be possible if you worked with authors and publishers beforehand (unlike say Google).

The trouble with Rupert Murdoch is that he does not want to compete, he wants a monopoly. That was his tactic with Sky Sports in the UK. Competing would mean having to provide quality, and Murdoch can't or won't do that. He demands the right to make money out of consumers, but accepts no responsibilities.

I have a sympathy though: I do not want to pay for services though being forced to watch advertising, I'm pretty hard-nosed about that. The trouble with Murdoch is that he expects people to pay and be advert-fodder too, so he is the wrong one to go subscription. The product would have to be something different from what he would offer to get me to bite.

The specialist mags seem to have got a model that works to a certain extent - the general news is subscription free, and the in-depth reporting is behind the wall - but that assumes a motivated customer.

Perhaps the big problem is that micro-payments never took off, partly because the commercial organisations thought micro meant 10s of cents/pennies rather than fractions - if people were charged 0.1p an article, bit more for meaty ones, they'd probably be pretty easy on paying per view.

In the end, I'd guess that Murdoch will end up with a world where if you buy the Sky package, the TV, the phone, the ISP, as part of that you get the other packages bundled in. There seem to be enough people who are immune to the awfulness of Sky.

It competes the extent that the RIAA has shown an ability to go after the pirates and for most people the comparative costs of a $5,000 lawsuit settlement (not to mention any lawyer's fees), outweighs the free. But, I suspect the newsmedia are hamstrung here in that their product isn't as separable as music. Policing exact copies of a NYT's story is easy enough, but reporting that the NYT's reported something is generally permitted and still kills the NYT's income stream.

It's definitely a different game, with a different solution (if there is one at all). Another problem with the newspapers compared to the music industry is that the kind of person who is willing to pay for a newspaper is probably more educated and discriminating than the kind of person who's willing to pay for an iTunes download. And the general quality of newspapers for the most part sucks. I think I'd already rank most newspapers below Wikipedia as far as average reliability, especially if I ignore obvious vandalism. I don't know, and really it's hard to say, because for breaking news I usually read both (just recently read both the Wikipedia article and two or three online newspaper articles for the scoop on Flight 253 - if a reliable newspaper could regularly produce articles as comprehensive as Wikipedia's on stories like that, maybe they'd be worth a few bucks a week - especially if they ran a section on congressional legislation before and after passage). (As an aside, I just checked, and as I suspected the Wikinews coverage of Flight 253 sucks.)

you don't think Encyc is decent competition? if enough humans got behind, then it could be... lol... so maybe you are right.

Well, let's say, for example, that you're looking for a standalone article about AA batteries. Wikipedians don't think this kind of article belongs in a general encyclopedia (closest thing is here). It's a good thing there are alternatives, right?

It can and does in some fields. Otherwise you would have no private schools in countries with universal free education. You would have no private medicine in countries with universal free health services. And so on.

Or married men visiting prostitutes!

Those are free in the sense that you don't pay for them directly (only through a chain of middle-men), but not in any other sense of the word. Or at least my check-stubs (as of 2009) list no deduction for "national free beer fund".

Also a private system usually will afford the student or patient greater freedom than a public one. Not much more mind you, but that difference could be worth every penny to students, patients, etc. with exceptional wants or needs (and the money to cover them).

There is really, but its hidden. The Free Beerers get to donate money to Free Kulture non-profits, lower their tax liability which in turn raises your own. That is what Greg is on about with his "taxed advantaged dollars" stuff.

OK, they're paid for by taxes. But having paid your taxes (or indeed even if you are a tax evader) they are free at the point of delivery whereas the alternatives cost you extra. Also, anyone who uses the services is being subsidised by those who don't. I bet the majority of income tax in most rich countries is paid by people who don't have children currently in school.

Yes of course the private ones are, or are perceived to be better or people wouldnt pay for them. So to return to the thread topic if people are convinced that a free newspaper/encyclopedia is rubbish and the paid for one is worth it they wil use the paid for one. Otherwisely they won't.

The NYT will never have a subscription of zero, just like public schools will never serve 100% of people. I remember reading that 10 years after AT&T divested, 3 million people were still renting their telephones since they never bothered to switch to the buy-your-own plan. The issue is that it remains to be seen if enough people will buy newspapers for the papers to remain in operation. Given the sharp declines in subscription and the massive uptick in free media usage, I think the answer is; no. I don't know what the NYT's breakeven point is, but I would be very surprised to see newspapers with 1/3 to 1/2 the circulation they had in 2005 still being in business in 2015.

Ah, that didn't occur to me, maybe because I'm not buried up to my ass in money like some. I mostly was exploring how a creative accountant would have to redefine "free" for the word to apply to a government program.