Blogs: No more free lunches? I’ll just eat elsewhere, thanks
My local newspapers are full of great articles written by journalists about finance, how-to repair, and general sound advice on a slew of topics. However, would I pay for all this actionable insight? Let’s just say, I haven’t purchased a newspaper in a very long time – and I’m willing to wager neither have you (at least not as often as you used to). The newspaper model is collapsing. The audience at large sees information as a commodity (for the most part). Why pay for one writer’s point of view, when I can find another three writer’s points of view for free – even if it isn’t quite as good.
UX meets Blog consumption
When it comes extracting information from consulting-type blog posts, I follow the same theory as Steve Krug when trying to find usability problems on websites. This is a bit of stretch but it makes sense to me (surprise!). For example, say we are trying to figure out how to fix a toilet and Bob Vila has a blog on fixing toilets but to read it will have to shell out a dollar. Do I feel that this information is worth a dollar? Sure, but is it worth me taking out my wallet, entering my information, authorizing the payment and burn a few minutes of my life? Um, no. What I’ll do, is do a Google search for fixing toilets, read three or four of the free articles and extract the major points from all of them. The idea is that while one blog may miss a point, if the point is important enough or significant enough, another blog will bring it up. Reading other points of view on the same subject doesn’t hurt either.
Laziness and Anti-Social Media
So off the toilet, and back to my point. Recently, a very well known and respected blogger, Dennis Howlett (you can follow him on Twitter: @dahowlett) started providing some premium content for a small fee. His explanation for doing so can be found here. While I respect his work, I simply cannot be bothered to pay to read his insights for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, I’m lazy. (OK, I’m not lazy in general, but my wallet is pretty far from my desk). Secondly, and more importantly in my eyes, is that it’s a blog. As a blog, it is part of the social media eco-system. You can create discussions with blogs and interact with readers with a click of a publish-button. Making people pay to engage with you seems pretty darn anti-social if you ask me – especially for a blog, which really, is often just a vehicle to boost one’s reputation in an industry (*cough*). Simply put, I feel that if someone decides to post actionable advice on his own blog, he has opted to work for free.
So while I wish Mr. Howlett all the luck in the world, unfortunately, the next time I run into a prompt telling me I need to pay to view some content – you can be sure that I’ll be Google-ing shortly afterwards and reading another three brilliant posts written by similarly qualified writers – for free.
P.S. Bob Vila does have an article about fixing toilets. Pssst, and it’s for free.
Interesting – so it’s the friction of the transaction, rather than the cost? That wrings true even for some bigger business decisions. But what if more and more of the value content moves behind pay walls, and Google is left with the SEO-driven dross? This seems to be the game theory that some of the big media players are running with. Or, looking at it another way, if content becomes free (abundance), surely people will pay for scarcity (quality editorial)? If someone had a low-friction transaction process, I’d happily pay to not spend an hour searching through Google results and duff pages to find the information I need. Freeing up valuable time to spend fixing the toilet, of course.
Interesting perspective Rommil and I tend to agree that a freemium model for blogging is about as viable as a freemium model for web apps… destined to failure….
So – you think Google knows everything? You don’t make the time investment comparison between messing about on Google and going straight to where the real action is happening? But I must admit – this article made me giggle. One to come back to as reference for muppetry.
@Rommil – with every major mdeia outlet struggling with this problem, I’m surprized you’re just ignoring it. I happily subscribe to some hard copy magazines, do you? Somebody has to pay for good quality witing/good content so these kind of busines models will emerge, and there’ll be people like Benjamin and me who’ll consider it.
@Ben – like it – did you know the Internet is free too….
Obviously, you cannot make sweeping statements and there will always be exceptions to the rule. So you have to take each publication/blog on a case-by-case basis in order to determine whether it will succeed economically or not. With that said, what it all boils down to is the aggregate perception of users/readers.
In the end you can see a blog as business and as such it would have to evaluated against some general criteria in order to judge its market position. Is the product (or the blog post in this situation) rare? Is it of value to readers? Can other authors/bloggers imitate it (or just blatantly steal it unfortunately)? And is the blogger organized sufficiently in order to take advantage or the situation?
The imitation issue brings up other micro-economic concepts such as substitution and indifference. Do enough readers feel that there are no perfect or suitable substitutes for the content? Or can they replace it with other products on different demand curves (i.e., cheaper).
So @David, whether or not I subscribe to print is not really relevant other than to identify me as part of a segment that doesn’t value print very highly for reasons such as latency and environment (the latter I would say is a strong factor in the decline in print publication success). And with regard to the “internet is free” – again, not really the point – as it’s the content in question, not the medium.
@Benjamin – you’re right that many will pay for scarce quality resources, but will there be enough to sustain a business? Time will tell. There is also something to be said about “fanatics”. Those who will pay for something they love regardless of the price barriers. Again, is this segment big enough? Also while you will want to spend money to save time, there are others who will spend hours looking for online coupons and discounts.
@Ben – I have to agree in general, but there will always be exceptions.
@Dennis – In terms of time investment, you could go the other direction. Instead of paying a little for blog posts, I could turn this around and only base my business decisions on vetted journals and articles (which in all likelihood may go over better with decision makers, or better yet, bring in a consultant to look at my particular case). Paying much more for opinions that are based on referenced facts might be more prudent in the long run and might be the ultimate destination of this debate. It’s the sandwich idea, where you never want to be priced in the middle ground because the discount producers can always cut into your revenue (free content) and the top end segment (consumers of journals) never move down to inferior products such as blogs.