News
Search
Software
West staff
online
Reference
|
Mystery of money-making
ONE of the reasons the Internet is such an exciting medium is that it is
reasonably cheap. Just look at the face of a non-Netizen when you tell them what can be
done on the Net in one hour:
* Read some of the world's great newspapers and magazines;
* Find the lyrics to that 1971 hit that has been humming away in the head;
* Help a child with a school project;
* Print out a list showing every innings of Steve Waugh's career;
* Send an e-mail to the White House, telling Bill Clinton to get on with his job.
"And what did that set you back?" the skeptical non-Netizen might ask. "The
cost of a phone call, about 25 cents," is the smug reply.
This expectation of cheap surfing makes it very hard for people to find ways to make money
out of the medium. I commented last week that the companies best able to find gold on the
Net were probably those that were big and rich already, and could use the Web as a new
shopfront to entice the population. Exactly how to do this is a mystery that many are
trying to solve.
Even a giant money-maker like Bill Gates's Microsoft is going through a learning curve.
Almost a year ago it decided the way to further enrich itself was to charge surfers about
$30 a year to read its good literary-newsy Web magazine called Slate.
Last week Slate did a total flip and announced all its online content would be free again.
And it claimed it would get more readers and make more money.
"There is too much free stuff out there, the process of paying and accessing what you
paid for is too clumsy and unfamiliar," Slate's editor Michael Kinsley said.
According to Wired News, most Web sites that have
made money on subscriptions sell either pornography or investment advice. Some
publications like the Economist, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have
charged subscriptions for their total online product and been happy with increased global
circulation. But a newbie like Slate found that only 25,000 people stuck with it when
money was demanded.
Kinsley says in a frank and amusing list of answers to imaginary questions about Slate's
backflip that only one in 15 people appeared to take the subscription bait when they
looked at the free front page. "It's painful to think of turning away so many Slate
readers from so much of our content," he admitted.
Kinsley now expects Slate will make money by attracting advertisers to its pages.
"The spreadsheet wizards figure that ad revenue from the increased traffic will more
than compensate for the lost subscriptions," he says.
In his Q and A, Kinsley poses the following: "Everybody said you can't charge for
content on the Internet. Information wants to be free. Unless it's about sex or stocks.
But oh no, you knew better. You'd show the world. You'd charge for news digests, for
political analysis, for cultural discussions, for poetry. Don't you feel like jerks?"
And he answers his own question this way: "This is terra incognita. We never claimed
to have found the one true path. We tried one thing, now we're trying something else, and
we'll keep trying until we figure it out."
As for Mr Gates's response, Kinsley claims the richest man in the world eventually called
off his killer dogs when the prospects of a much bigger audience and consequent increased
advertising revenue were explained.
All articles Copyright: © West Australian Newspapers |
