Publishers Need To Unite Or Die

from the tying-everything-together dept

Back in March we discussed a plan to have a number of different online publishers team up into single subscription-based groups, so that people could sign up for a single subscription and get numerous content under one roof. The reasoning was that if each content provider goes it alone and tries to charge for access, they'll never have the economies of scale to make it (witness Salon's recent troubles). Now, Business 2.0 is suggesting a similar thing and going so far as to say that the various content providers should make use of the same platform as well, to pool their technical resources. Of course, recently, a bunch of publishers teamed up to sell ads together, so perhaps some are realizing that working together is the way to go. The problem with this model, of course, is that by teaming up, there's usually going to be the "main draw" and other sites that are the slackers - and the main draw will end up subsidizing the survival of the slackers. Still, if they can really provide economies of scale across multiple sites, it certainly could be worthwhile.

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