Factiva CEO Says All Online Content Will Cost Money In Two Years

Predictions

from the wait-a-second... dept

Factiva’s CEO is predicting that all online media companies will charge for access within two years. I think this is highly unlikely. She claims that consumers have been trained to think that online content has no value, since they’ve been getting it for free for so long. She’s wrong. Online content has value. That’s why people pay for internet access – to get access to all that internet content. The fact that they don’t specifically pay her is a business model issue that she needs to work on. But, trying to charge people for basic news online is very difficult. There are so many other sources that will produce the same content that there’s no way all news sources will charge. Unless a content provider offers vastly differentiated news (such as the Wall Street Journal), they will find themselves in a competitive market where the price gets driven back to zero – or they’ll simply go out of business. What the media providers need to realize is that the content has to be part of the pull for other value added services that people pay for. Business customers pay for Factiva (and, similarly, for Techdirt Corporate Intelligence) because they provide additional, useful services above and beyond the content (in Factiva’s case the searching, sorting and alerting – in Techdirt’s case, the sorting, finding, archiving, summarizing, and most importantly the analysis). The content is just a commodity.