Will you "PAY" for Free Content

Hi Folks,

Now-a-days, internet is the prime necessity for most of the users. Every user wants the content to be online so that it can be easily accessible but what about the solution to this system. The patterns which get formed by these complicated things will make the system worse.

I will give you an example.
Mr. A says that he plans to put his content, which covers the known world and some others as well, behind a firewall so that people will have to pay for it. He thinks the future of web content will be pay-as-you-go.

But is he thinking right? Will customer pay for the content provided by him by paying when at the same time, it is provided free of cost by the other provider.

Today’s New York Times has a nice puff piece today about the Financial Times, which also charges people for access to its content on the internet. So on the one hand, there seems to be a groundswell moving to make charging for content the hipster move on the web. On the other hand, the only really hot spots in the cloud are free.


Would anybody pay for YouTube?
If it cost 5-cents per tweet, would there be so many tweeters?
How about Facebook or Orkut? Will you make so many friends or so many scrap if it will be paid service?
Would millions of lonely, homebound losers be encapsulating their lives in their entire digital splendor if they had to whip out a credit card to do so?
Or Google?
Would we thoughtlessly search a billion times a year if at the end of every month we were awarded a bill that tabulated the cost of every click?

Hmmm... I guess we never gave a thought to it. But now lots of these companies are trying to find the solution and to increase their revenue.

My opinion is that media has always been driven by advertising that users can choose to entertain or ignore. Even newspapers — which would seem to break that mold by charging a pittance for their content — have been subsidized by their advertising for centuries.

The moment I hit a site that asks me for money, I simply navigate to calmer waters. How about you?

The big media outlets are all abuzz with the financial plans of online entities to move to a new business model based on subscriptions. Would you pay for the stuff you do online? I mean the clean stuff?

Copyright © Hardik Upadhyay

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JSK