García Interactive: ‘Death to the free’ – John Duncan on why people should pay
January 13th, 2009Posted by Judith Townend in Editors' pick, Online Journalism
Inspired by three online news items (David Carr on NYTimes.com; Gawker’s Nick Denton / Jonah Bloom of AdAge), John Duncan argues on Garcia International that the ‘recession is (ultimately) good for online publishing.’
“There comes a time for most orthodoxies when they just plain run out of doxy,” he writes…”The biggest mistake newspapers made in the internet era was to devalue content by dishing it out for free.”
His point is perhaps clearest in his final paragraph:
“What we are learning now is that a user of a free product does not have remotely the same value as a customer of a paying one.”
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