Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/05/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Ted, No sane person would subscribe to the Leica Camera web site, but I can very well imagine paying for access to, say, the Financial Times web site. It contains high-value information that I need for my work, and the subscription to the traditional paper edition is around 800 CHF per year. Right now I can access FT for free, but should they decide to charge, I would most definitely pay up, as long as it was reasonable relative to the cost of the paper. My other chief source of quality journalism, The Economist, makes its web site fully accessible only to the subscribers to the magazine, so in that sense it is already not free. The reality is that high-quality content is expensive to produce, and one way or another, the creators of it have to earn a living. A couple of years ago the model was advertising, like "free" TV in the U.S., but now it is clear that with the extremely low click-through rates and the dot.com bust, advertising is not going to pay for anything. So some form of subscription charges to high-value content sites is inevitable. The Internet porn industry has been operating quite successfully in this manner for several years now. Of course, if you are in the business of selling physical products, like Leica, then your web site does not need to make money, it is just another part of your marketing programme. But if you are selling information and nothing else, then you need to figure out how to make people pay for it, otherwise you do not have a viable business model. Nathan Ted Grant wrote: > I believe about a month ago there was a story that many of the "free access" > channels, sites, whatever, may be going to a subscriber route in the not too > distant future as they were doing all the work for no return or the returns > they had experienced were diminishing at a great rate and costing the > information provider money . > > Obviously the web is going to slowly or possibly a "pay as you use" thing > rather than the freebie it's been all these past years. > > Do you have any read on this happening? I mean would anyone subscribe to > open the Leica Camera site in Germany? ;-) > ted > > Ted Grant Photography Limited > www.islandnet.com/~tedgrant > > -- > To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html - -- Nathan Wajsman Herrliberg (ZH), Switzerland e-mail: wajsman@webshuttle.ch mobile: +41 78 732 1430 Photo-A-Week: http://www.wajsman.com/indexpaw2002.htm General photo site: http://www.wajsman.com/index.htm - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html