As a writer and blogger myself I am acutely aware of the time and energy it takes to generate content.  It’s not a simple process and coming up with the ideas alone can be tough.  To this end, it is hardly virgin territory to talk about whether or not content should be free or not.  Yesterday’s news that News International is going to start charging readers £1 a day or £2 a week to subscribe to The Times and Sunday Times online hardly comes as a shock.  News Corp, News International’s parent company, has been at the forefront of arguments about pay walls and The Times have been loosing £250,000 a day for ages.

With the closure of many newspapers in recent years, and the purchase yesterday of the London Independent by Russian billionaire, Alexander Lebedev, for £1 plus payments totaling £10 million over the next few years, the move by the Times has been a long time coming.  But with all the talk about the death of newspaper and the written word, can anyone really make a living at the writing game.  Do you really have to be a journo superstar to make a dime in the publishing field?

Pittance from AdSense & Cultural Vandalism

Everybody touts the benefits of AdSense and advertising networks, but, as a site visitor, do you really want to see ads? Let alone click them?  Aren’t we all desensitised anyhow? And in reality how much money do bloggers actually make from ads on their web site?  Is it a viable living?

From my experience even with over 500 visitors daily you might only make 1 dollar a day.  Based on that metric you would need 50,000 visitors daily to make your blog activities worthwhile, and that’s assuming the rate of conversion scales per each new set of 500 visitors.  Anyhow, advertising isn’t really the way to pay for anything.  It’s a falsehood of gross proportions and the kind of thing that would make Gödel proud.

The reality is that the cost of free services in the long run can be counted, not just in money terms but cultural channels too, and who cares when you can make hay whilst light lasts, right?  Media isn’t part of the cultural sector and it will hardly ever receive government funding, but it serves a useful service on many levels.  Can existing online services really replace traditional media channels, online or off?  In the end, someone really has to pony up somewhere along the line.

Charitable Cause (Flogging a Dead Horse)

Seasoned blogger, CultureGrrl, recently asked in her post about WQXR radio, Why I’m Donating to WQXR, do the best blogs have to be free?  And she, quite rightly, has a point.  Are donate buttons really going to become a standard feature of your favourite blogs, cultural institute websites and elsewhere? And surely aren’t site visitors going to become blocked to them in the same way as they are to adverts on web sites?

My favourite online music store, Aquarius Records, recently added a donation button to their homepage.  This is a 30 year old San Francisco institution that seems to be suffering in the digital age, despite the amazing work they do for the alternative, experimental and underground music scenes. Their very existence will be destroyed by the advent of the download and changing habits, but who does this benefit from their demise?  You could argue they aren’t providing a niche, convenient or beneficial service, but as a music love I would disagree.  I am not the nostalgic old codger it might sound like, but I think there is virtue in supporting such businesses through patronage and actually paying for the services and products they sell. It would be a travesty on many fronts if they died.  National Record Day helps foist the standard of music lovers across the length and breadth of the world, but we need on-going support for what they do, not just one day a year, and this is true of all businesses.

In his wry look on the American Life the road-documentary, Unchained America, British comedian Dave Gorman, looks at the impact of corporate America and how, despite everything it is still possible to live in the states on “independent” means, i.e. frequent and give custom to independent business outlets, despite decades of squeeze from large corporate and highly marketed and branded juggernauts, the likes of Exxon, Starbucks, Hilton, etc.  Independent business should still be able to save itself, despite the onslaught of the internet, and it makes for a better world in my opinion if it does.  No one benefits from a monopoly or hegemony.

Donations are voluntary, as is consumption.  Paying for service is the best way to provide voluntary donation to a business.  If you don’t like the service, don’t use it.  To many a reader of the NY Times, The Guardian or any other paper online, you could easily find the same information elsewhere, but you go there for a reason.  It is disingenuous to say it should remain free simply because you don’t wish to pay.  These outlets provide a singular source of quality and convenience.

iTunes isn’t a success because it is unique, but because of the quality and convenience it provides.  They charge at the point of checkout, so what’s wholly wrong if papers and other businesses do the same thing.  The problem is, there are plenty of freeloaders.  Out of 4m+ registered users on Last.fm there were less than 20,000 paying subscribers at $3 a month.  Maybe their service just wasn’t worth $3 a month, but you would like to think more people like to support a business they love and find so useful.

The Changing Game of Free

Online you could perhaps argue otherwise, but in the real world, the advent of the free newspaper has not meant the continued excellence and quality of journalism.  In my esteemed opinion, the free papers that plague the tube and make a mess as lazy commuters throw them on the floor, represent nothing more than the sordid broadsheets of the 1700s, where the likes of the Newgate Calendar have been replaced with talk of Jordan’s latest boob job.

The problem is that once you give something away for free, the cat is already out of the bag, and it is impossible to go back.  This has been true since the beggining.  As soon as you put a price on something, economists will tell you that demand will drop.  The only group of items that this is not true of is luxury goods, of which I am sure we can agree data and information is not one.  The shit storm that ensued after Last.fm started charging worldwide users for services that were previously free, shows the level of vitriol and aversion online users have for paying for anything (10% of the comments on that blog post include the word F%$#).  I suppose if you have a niche that you are exploiting and your readers, users or subscribers respect the quality of your output then it makes the process of monetisation a lot easier, but its never an easy tight rope to tread, especially when the volume of naysayers is large.

The music and movie industry, through the RIAA and many other organisations has taken the heavy handed approach, by suing copyright infringers, but this approach clearly doesn’t work.  It hasn’t stopped anything, and if anything has hardened the chorus of voices calling for a new world order.  Turning your readers and customers in criminals is hardly the way to go.  This interesting article in Ars Tecnica, Piracy Up in France After 3 Strikes Law Passed, points out a clear problem and response.  There is a definite backlash to heavy handed techniques, as the advent of the Pirate Party in Sweden and now worldwide shows us.  In spite of the abuse by many large entities, people also need to recognise that copyright is a means by which to support cultural endeavours, not merely demonise your consumers.

Give it Away and Still Make Money

One of the most successful eBooks of all time is one that costs 19 USD and can be viewed online for FREE.  Even after 5 years they still charge $19 for the book – some things apparently don’t go out of date.  So, if you can view it for free online, how did they end up selling over 30,000 copies?

The Pirate’s Dilemma by Matt Mason is a another book that was published and released online for free also.  Taking a leaf out of Mason’s own book, he decided that a free online copy wouldn’t impinge on the actual sales figures of a hardback and paperback editions, and apparently he was right.  Just because something is free and online doesn’t mean people will find, use or share it, and there is often a preference for a physical copy.

The “free flow of ideas” is one that even the most eminent of academic institutions, from MIT to Harvard and so on across the Ivy League is being grappled with, only recently, MIT has voted unanimously to open up access to their scholarly journals, as covered in this blog posted on Smithsonian 2.0, Courage To Go Open Content.  Yet here something is to be gained.  The passage of this particular information is a two-way street and one which can lead to a greater academic excellence.  Not that the same could be said for our big name new outlets and other content online.

Whether you are a amateur or pro-blogger, whether you have a day job, and whether or not you make a living as a journalist it is a tough business.  In recent encounters with 2 very different journalists it was clear that making a living, whether well known or not, is a tough path to tread.  It seems the only way to make money in the real world is to sell something, some would say by offering added value or service.

A good friend of mine who is in a band called Bim made a small packet from hitting the big time with an animation on for their song Stay in My Memory on YouTube, that received over 600,00 views.  The net result was that the song was in the top 5 of the iTunes electronic music chart for a week or two.  Out of this, after commissions were paid the band might have been luck to have made a just about 5 figures.  Considering this didn’t include the cost of producing the original animation, done as a favour by my friend’s sister, Gobblynne, the band would have still been out of pocket to the tune of £10-£20,000, based on real world commercial production costings.  So hardly a promising equation. If only news could go on tour!

There Will Always Be Some

There will always be those who want to hijack content for nothing, to share it for free, to pay nothing for it, or even insist you work for free for the greater good, whether for social, political or economic gain, and they have their motives, but here in the real world, where blood, sweat and tears, don’t buy you lunch, it is important for those to realise that everyone has to make a living.

In many respects though this is more than just about money.  Back on the issue of news, maybe no one reads newspapers any more, no one watches TV news, and no one can be bothered to read anything other than the advertising support gossip-laden free newspapers, but if, as in Italy and other countries, the UK is happy for a billionaire to control a large tranche of media, then by all means, let him buy them up for a song and a dance.  The problem is that I don’t think anyone will agree that so much voice being controlled by one person such as Lebedev, or, as in the Italian case, Prime Minister Berlusconi, is a good thing.  People already complain about Murdoch, and he fits better the part as free-wheeling capitalist, happy to cowtow to his audience’s opinions, from the Sun Newspaper to the Fox News network.

These are the long terms costs you pay with short term savings of FREE.  The exorbitant cost and loss-leading business of news control will become the plaything of the incredibly wealthy, controlling and swaying opinion to whatever end.  To me this is exceedingly short-sighted given that you are saving no more than the price of a cup of coffee a day, and I think we can all afford that!

To me it is clear that the papers and other outlets for news and media are not resistant to change.  Many have been slow to exploit their strengths and positions online, which is why they are losing out now.  This is not 1999 and we are not talking about Napster and the music industry.  Outlets like the NY Times have done a sterling job in repositioning themselves, with APIs and other services, but even they are being hammered in the present climate.

New subscription models need to be, and will be found, but it’s clear given the heavy cost of running online media outlets that produce quality output, readers will have to pay in the long term.  The BBC does a great job, but it is massively subsidised by the British public and backed by the government in its endeavours.  We can’t expect the news landscape to remain the same and be an equally unbiased marketplace for the exchange of ideas unless we ensure a stable future for the platform.  People have to realise that paying for quality is a price worth paying, and newspapers need to realise the advent of the internet, and social networks for breaking news is not the end of the world, but rather a means to enhance delivery.