The free internet is over?

Lansky, a writer for Fortune magazine, writing a lengthy report about Buffett's combined 3G capital spending 28 billion of dollars to buy Heinz, he chose to do a "small advertisement" on LinkedIn, which was to publish a relatively long preview of "fortune", but not all of it, If you want to see the full article, please click on it, and only "fortune" subscribers can read it. For young people who need free reading, Lansky's view is quite different.

See him this post of netizens boiling, get the most "praise" a comment is like this: "If your fortune article and this LinkedIn post is as empty as this, I think I will choose free news site, please send a few spam posts." ”

Lansky to have such comments, also not weakness, and then wrote a post to defend the fee reading mode, the slightest reluctance to provoke to the anger of the post apology.

Lansky to the media: "For these readers, I made a social media error, which is linked to a must pay to read articles." ”

In this view, the Internet content of the charging mode and free mode, whether there has been an incompatible "38 line"?

Financial challenges

The circulation of traditional newspapers and advertising revenue, there has been a sharp decline, they want to use the content of the site to cover the loss of fees.

"Advertising on newspapers and other websites is weak because advertisers can pinpoint a specific audience through Google or Facebook," said Andrew-sullivan, the industry blogger. ”

Sullivan has an independent blog "The Dish", the monthly readership of more than million. He stripped his blog out of Newsweek and the Daily Beast's web site, where bloggers had to pay 20 of dollars a year to read.

"Our media must find another revenue model outside of advertising, which is an unreliable income in the long run," said Sullivan. ”

The Lansky said that advertising-supported online news services are difficult to sustain, require other sources of revenue, and charging readers is a good model.

Now it seems that some readers are unwilling to pay for web content, and some websites are aware of the problem and set up a flexible toll wall model. The New York Times website, for example, allows readers to read 10 articles a month for free, and then ask the reader to become a member of the payment.

The Times, which allows readers to read the passages at the beginning of the article, can only be read in full by paying members.

The Wall Street Journal and the FT's Web site combine free content that does not need to register for free content, charge content, and registered members to read. In addition, the newspaper website also carries on the promotion to the fee package, or bundles other products and the service provides to the reader.

In addition, as Amazon buys the veteran Washington Post, he will bring the newspaper a business model with new ventures or retail features.

Pay with Read

Among the computer scientists who invented the World Wide Web, in addition to Tim-berners-lee, there was a Belgian scientist named Cario (Robert-cailliau).

The early Internet was a network system that connected universities around the world, because they had been unable to access papers and materials easily from one another.

Cario has now retired from the European Atomic Energy Research Center and lives in France. "How to treat the value of information," he says, has plagued the industry for more than 20 of years. "It's hard for a person to say that I worked my butt off and updated the article, you have to read must pay, like a penny per click." ”

Cario says the way to charge a monthly reading fee is not only expensive but too restrictive. In his view, the mobile telecommunications industry's prepaid mode (PAY-AS) is suitable for Internet content. "When you send a message, you pay a small fee and each individual act should be paid separately." ”

"When I read the article, the browser will automatically pay a penny or two cents, and I don't even feel it, and I don't have to deposit a huge amount of money in advance," Cario says. ”

The scientists say the telecoms industry has successfully implemented Pay-as-you-go, and the world's telecoms system can calculate bills for every user's consumption, so news sites can do the same.

Bezos and the future

Estuary (Tien-tzuo) is the CEO of Zuora, a San Francisco company that mainly helps other websites manage fee-based businesses. Their clients include "News International", the "Times" parent, and Fairfax, the Australian newspaper giant.

Estuary says it is a viable model, but not the ideal one, to read a fee of two cents per article. In fact, in addition to prepaid, telecom operators also have a lot of packages and fees, such as pay-back, family planning, night and weekend plans, unlimited planning, bundled packages and so on.

"Consumers don't like to be measured or they just make a phone call and they feel charged and must end the call as soon as possible," he says. ”

After Bezos entered the newspaper industry, everyone wondered what kind of business model he would bring. "Many people forget that Amazon has built warehouses and logistics centers, and there are a lot of offline entities in addition to the online business," says Estuary. ”

For newspapers, he says, some people still want to be able to see print newspapers in the process of commuting to the bus or subway, and at the big kitchen table on weekends, where people want to spread the Sunday newspaper and find out what they like to read.

Estuary that even if there is no fee model, news sites will not be able to live, such as Evernote and Dropbox and other service providers, they take the free value-added model, free products have great value, and users who need more services must pay.

Today, we can still see a lot of free news, but things can change. How to balance the reader's reading habits and the business needs of the news industry is still a difficult problem to solve.