Content’s Value is Over-Estimated by Producers
Monday, March 29th, 2010
There is no secret in the publishing industry that newspapers are against the wall. Several large US city based papers went to the wall last year with multi-billion dollar debts. The problem is fundamentally that the web makes information freely available… so why aren’t we willing to pay for it?
Rupert Murdoch has decided that from June 2010 the Times and Sunday Times websites will cost the consumer one pound per day or two pounds per week to access. He optimistically predicts a 5% conversion rate into that business model.
Jeffrey Zeldman supports a rational argument in Content Wants to be Paid for stating that content costs money to produce and that content should exist either as a money generating feature, or at the least as a secondary feature that generates money. On the surface it sounds like a plausible argument… but like all states of an answer I would say ‘it depends’.
First, apples and oranges are not easy to compare so content on my website, content on Zeldman’s website and content on the Sunday Times website in the UK are three entirely different things. Which, of those three, is the content that wants to be paid for? Because content is either produced for money or its not produced for money… and it is not the producer who ultimately determines the value of the content.
The value of content is determined by the market forces… the price consumers of the content are willing to pay for it.
As I wrote in Zeldman’s comments:
In short… something is only worth what the other party is willing to pay for it. Not what we value it at ourselves. I can go dig a hole, for example, and send a bill for 2 hours labour but if nobody is willing to pay for that hole then the value of the hole is zero dollars, not $80… Realistically you have to assess your individual information’s value to a specific market segment willing to pay for it. Somebody has to value your $1 of information at greater than $1 or equal to $1. That’s basic business…. No producer of any product in the world is entitled to be paid for any effort. Its the market that decides your value to them – they have the cash and they must be willing to make a transaction.Steven Clark
