Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

Web 2.0 party is over — you're going to pay for the news again, and hopefully more

Recently at my personal blog I’ve been focusing on the idiocy of Web 2.0’s central strategy for growth, namely creating online networks or communities where costly participation is given away for free. (The profitable online papers charge, YouTube and Facebook still not profitable, and a more general round-up of the second dot-com bust.) The hope was that hosting a free party with an open bar would attract a large crowd, and that this in turn would lead to ever-increasing ad revenues. That business model was doomed to failure during the first dot-com boom, and it is just as doomed during the second one (Web 2.0). In the meantime, following this strategy leads to cultural output typical of attention whores rather than the output of inventors and creators with secure patronage.

I was delighted today to discover that all of this is about to change. It’s still pretty hush-hush — no “buzz in the blogosphere” — as I’ve read a fair number of articles on the topic, yet none has mentioned the coming change, even if they’ve mentioned the change earlier in the year. Starting sometime this fall, online newspapers will finally start to charge for access to their sites, although who they charge, how much, and in what manner (yearly, per article, etc.), is entirely up to the individual papers, and we don’t know what shape that will take just yet. The business model of Journalism Online, the group that’s spearheading the change, says they’re aiming to get revenues from the top 10% of readers by visit frequency. In any case, the point is that the era of unlimited free access to online journalism is dead.

Journalism Online seems to be a central hub that readers will go through to get to the various member organizations’ publications, perhaps the way college students go through their university library’s website to get access to various journals. According to co-founder Leo Hindery (as I heard on Bloomberg TV today), there are over 600 papers on board, and you can bet that includes most or all of the big ones, as they provide the best quality and yet receive no money from users (other than the FT and WSJ). All of the customer’s payments will be kept track of through this one site. I don’t have much more detail to give, since the Journalism Online website lays it out succinctly. Go read through the business model section and the press section (the 31-page PDF listed under “Industry Reports” is the most detailed).

This is the first nail in the coffin of Web 2.0, and once the other give-it-away internet companies see how profitable it is to actually — gasp! — charge for your product, they will wake up from their pipe dream of growing by attracting a big crowd and pushing ads. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, perhaps other components of Google, Wikipedia — they can either charge and profit or get shoved out of the market by those who are growing by charging. The winners will have more to invest in improving their products and maybe even funding their industry’s equivalent of basic R&D, we’ll see a cultural output that won’t pander quite so much to the lowest common denominator to chase ad revenue, and best of all — the quality newspapers, social networking sites, and so on, will continue to exist and grow rather than be claimed as further casualties of the moronic dot-com boom mentality. At last the internet is sobering up from its 15-year Bender of Free.

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