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Not giving away anything...
Hmm... giving away the franchise seems irrational until you look at the numbers. I just don't think that subscriber-only "fresh" editorial can scale in terms of numbers - you cannot sacrifice guaranteed CPMs (even at filler rates from national advertisers, ad networks or whatever) for page views. I've seen what this kind of mentality does within the internal politics of a newspaper, having worked on a subscriber premium product. The very existence of "premium" content puts the newspaper at war with their readers and themselves, making every determination of what goes free and what doesn't driven by politics and fear of losing subscribers, not by dollars. I think that premium content divides and conquers a newspaper needing to do everything it can to increase page views. Free, open archives are part of this, but any sort of walled garden seems to say, we are at "war with our readers" because they don't like our incumbent business. Smart newspapers will embrace all media, print and online, but online, they need to play like members of the community appropriate to the media they are delivering to. Online, if newspapers do not deliver archives for free, Google will largely do most of that for them (without need for permission); if newspapers do this to fresh local content, dozens of smaller community publishers online and in print will eat their lunch. The threat to newspapers is much less from Google and Yahoo, and more from disruptive innovations in local publishing from below (especially in metro markets). Sean There are responses to this message:
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