Dilbert Takes On The Paywall
from the destroying-revenue dept
As a few of you have sent in, it looks like Scott Adams isn’t a huge fan of paywalls, and has expressed that with his latest Dilbert strip:
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Comments on “Dilbert Takes On The Paywall”
Pot / Kettle much?
Pretty rich for someone who used to have their comic archive locked up behind a subscription paywall himself.
I assume he doesn’t now, but I know they used to be. (At work so I can’t exactly check)
I do remember though “way back” before google ads & decent cpc/cpa etc, that the paywall made sense on some sites, advertising impressions while good initially were worth close to nothing, and you couldn’t make back your bandwidth costs – let alone other operating costs.
Re: Pot / Kettle much?
Wasn’t that paywall implemented by the comics syndicate he publishes to?
Comics.com certainly used to only present a 30-day archive to readers, but now allows you to access their entire archives. I’m pretty sure Dilbert is syndicated by the same people.
This was back at the time, though, when selling comics archives was still pretty big business. Look at the Far Side compilations. Those were very nice books, very well presented and frankly a genuine luxury item.
As webcomics have taken off and sales of printed *everything* have dried up, I think the comics syndicates (which have a fairly profitable main business in selling direct-to-newspaper) have been reasonably quick in responding to the change in the market.
They used to be crippled online by the fact that the internet was full of freaks, and freaks all read freakish webcomics, but now that the mainstream has arrived on the internet, I’m sure that the mainstream comics business is going to be starting to bring in some pretty serious mainstream advertising revenue again.
Wild digression aside, yeah, I don’t think that that was his paywall.
Re: Pot / Kettle much?
Pretty rich for someone who used to have their comic archive locked up behind a subscription paywall himself.
Even if the paywall was his decision, isn’t that exactly the sort of person who would criticize paywalls? Someone who had tried it and found it doesn’t work?
Re: Pot / Kettle much?
Pretty rich for someone who used to have their comic archive locked up behind a subscription paywall himself.
Really? When was that? I’ve been reading his strips for free from his website since 2007 and the only change I noticed was the new annyoing design that made me change my bookmark to http://www.dilbert.com/fast.
Pulp Fiction – The Golden Age of Sci Fi, Fantasy & Adventure – Full Length Feature
I was watching this “documentary” about how pulp-fiction took off, how it died and the influences that it brought to science and movies productions of today.
Funny that the most creative era of America was when people didn’t make huge amounts of money out of things they just did it because they wanted to.
Maybe my grandchildren will see some documentary in 50 years about how great comics strips were in the 90’s LoL
Re: Re:
What?! They did it because they were passionate, and barely got paid? Next you’re going to tell me they didn’t whine…
Newspapers & Paywalls
We develop newspapers websites, and you would be surprised at the amount of time these companies spend on maintaining the paywall instead of concentrating on advertising. Between staff costs and server costs, these newspapers are losing money on idea of charging readers for reading the content, instead of spending the money on creating a better user experience.
I’m sure he’s created an alter-ego and voted his anti-paywall strip 5 stars out of 5 as it is written by a genius.
Seems Unfair ...
… to tar all future paywalls with the same brush, just by looking at the ones that have gone before.
Re: Seems Unfair ...
….to learn from the past so that we don’t make the same mistakes again and again and again and again….
/sarcasm
If a paywall model is ever found that is actually valuable to the user in any way, I’m sure Mike will praise it. None of the paywalls mentioned here have ever even tried to do that, and many have even been stupid enough to try locking up content that is easily available in many other places.
Does anybody argue that paywalls are valuable to the user? Isn’t the idea just to provide revenue for the business so they can keep producing content? I agree, I don’t think there is a paywall model that could be “valuable to the user”, but then again, you could say the same thing about any subscription model (the consumer prefers to get all the content for free, as opposed to paying for it.)
Most paywalls seem to have been failures. What about Consumer Reports, though? I think they’re in a somewhat unique situation. You can’t access most of their content without paying a subscription fee, which I believe would be considered a paywall. On the other hand, the nature of what they do (reviewing consumer products) means if they were to have any advertising, it would be a conflict of interest. They pride themselves on avoiding such conflicts by instead charging a subscription fee for access to their reviews. It works quite well for them. But again, maybe this is because of their unique situation. The same wouldn’t apply to, say, a news site.
Re: Re:
There are always exceptions to the rule…