Comments on: Did we ever pay for content?

By: What’s the Buzz: The Bookseller Tweets FBF Booths; Content vs. Format

What’s the Buzz: The Bookseller Tweets FBF Booths; Content vs. Format — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:18:55 +0000

[...] also offers his take on the future of making money from content. Media guru and author Jeff Jarvis responds. GD Star Ratingloading… Read more articles like this [...]

By: Blog This! » Paying for content (not)

Blog This! » Paying for content (not) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 01:14:44 +0000

[...] Hat tip to Jeff Jarvis. [...]

By: Blogs Worth Mentioning – http://www.journalism.co.uk/ | ALJ301

Blogs Worth Mentioning – http://www.journalism.co.uk/ | ALJ301 — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:04:47 +0000

[...] http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/09/19/did-we-ever-pay-for-content/). This entry was a discussion on how media companies can continue to make money by exploiting new technologies. Jeff’s rationale in regards to making money not from the content but rather indirectly from other products it creates, makes obvious sense. He talks about the music industry and making money not from the music itself but rather from concerts and t-shirt sales. Although media companies have always done this through advertising, they now need to get more creative and move in the direction music has. [...]

By: cm

cm — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:02:05 +0000

It depends on your business model.

Are you in business to produce a certain product? ie. the most informative news you can for a selected audience?

Are you in business to merely make the biggest profit you can? ie. generate the content that gets the most readers and ad dollars?

If you’re purely market driven then you’re going to slowly slide from the first group (if you were ever there) to the second group.

You just need to look at how some publications like Nature and National Geographic have sacrificed integrity and quality for profitability. Both these publications have made huge efforts to become more appealing and easier to digest but as a resu8lt are no longer of interest to their core readership of years ago.

By: cm

cm — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:46:00 +0000

The logical conclusion to this is: Do we ever really pay for anything? We just pay for the convenience and packaging.

Take food as an example: We’re biologically driven to eat food for nutrients. You can go to a fancy French restaurant and buy a plate with almost nothing on it for $30, or you could get the same nutrients at the vegetable store for $1 or pick your own in a wild meadow for $0. So what the hell are you actually paying $30 for? It sure isn’t the nutrients.

Cost, price and value are only very loosely linked. Clearly if price > cost, you’re screwed and you don’t have a profitable business unless you can find some other revenue stream.

Sure, content providers could give in to piracy and adjust their business models to fit (eg. concerts rather than song sales), but surely the content provider is the person that should decide what business models they want to use. It surely should not be chosen by the pirates.

The Economist and Time don’t sell the same product at all and comparing them on journalistic quality is severely broken. Nobody is buying Time for quality journalism. They’re just buying a semi-digested news smoothie that doesn’t need any thought: glug, glug, glug. The Economist is going to give you the news behind the news and is going to require that you actually do some thinking. Not everyone wants that.

It isn’t really clear that you can always just rely on giving content away. Give away the song and make oney on T shirts… until they pirate your T shirts too!

[And, btw, I'm an open source developer so I know a bit about giving stuff away for free. I make money from that when people ask for changes or when people want to use my software in a non-open source fashion].

By: This week in media musings: Shirky speaks, and three new projects to watch | Mark Coddington

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:31:23 +0000

[...] they’re going to be forced to realize that they were selling the medium, not the content. Jeff Jarvis thinks it’s as seminal as Shirky’s “Thinking the Unthinkable,” but I think the [...]

By: John

John — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 21:31:52 +0000

For bands, it’s the present…more or less. Most don’t make significant money on selling their recorded music, but on selling their live events and related paraphernalia. Of course, the big bands are exceptional, but that’s not most musicians.

By: dugfromthearth

dugfromthearth — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:19:55 +0000

When you paid for the ebook you were not really paying for the content. The content is available to you free from the library. Or by borrowing it from a friend. What you paid for was the form of the content in an ebook that you own. You paid for a more direct and faster means of accessing the content.

By: Briantist

Briantist — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:23:54 +0000

Another analogy is that the idea that the Car Industry only exists because the Petrol Industry needs it.

By: cliff barney

cliff barney — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:03:59 +0000

newspapers do occasionally add pages for a big unexpected story, e. g. 9/11. however normally newspaper size is determined by the amount of advertising; a paper will strive for a particular ad/news ratio and adjust the press run according to that formula. the “news hole” is what’s left after you insert the ads.

By: Briantist

Briantist — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:10:59 +0000

Graham’s article is excellent.

It is a bit like The Selfish Gene, sometimes you have to look at the right bit to see what’s going on.

By: Kathy Gill

Kathy Gill — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:49:48 +0000

Hi, Jeff -- I wrote several pieces on the fact that we have never paid for content back in March, when Seattle was in the grips of anxiety about the PI. The first was "No More Free Content"

By: Mike Manitoba

Mike Manitoba — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 05:43:07 +0000

In other words, start writing like Glenn Beck.

By: Pablo Aslan

Pablo Aslan — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:27:03 +0000

“Give music away and make money from concerts and t-shirts. ”

You don’t really think this is the future of the music business, do you?

By: Bob P.

Bob P. — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:12:54 +0000

I’m with you AnnB. I’m certainly no advocate of paywalls, and I think Jarvis is right about many things. But this Graham piece is a bunch of nonsense, He might be thinking to hard

By: Jeff Jarvis

Jeff Jarvis — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:07:05 +0000

True of any product: It has to work in the marketplace, in other words.

By: Journalism, Dresses and Augmented Reality « Kadet Communications

Journalism, Dresses and Augmented Reality « Kadet Communications — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:48:11 +0000

[...] Jeff Jarvis at The Buzz Machine. I read Prof. Jeff Jarvis and I get pissed off. His writing style echoes his title — it hums and stings and screeches like an industrial lathe. But I respect the heck out of what he’s doing — if poking smart people in news media prods them to create something new and sustainable, I’m all for it. Today’s post discusses the difference between paying for information and paying for “content”…and says that news media publishers “flatter themselves” if they think they’re in the information business. They have always been, he says, in the business of selling format over content. So what will the next winning format be? “When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.” Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Building “Verification Communities”Re-imagining Journalism 2.0 « Webs@WorkChurch plans tangible change to a community [...]

By: prophet666

prophet666 — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:49:37 +0000

i agree that free content is everyones right but the content giver has to cover his costs so its fair to pay for it.

By: Eric Tyson

Eric Tyson — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:40:06 +0000

Good point AnnB: It’s another example of ignorance regarding the business world and doing product line pricing and profitability. Of course your costs matter! And, of course, if there’s a more efficient way to deliver your product then that will drive down the cost.

Newspapers made the mistake in giving away their valuable content for free online and not looking at their costs and profits soon enough from online. That’s why so many poorly run papers have gone under.

By: Jeff Jarvis

Jeff Jarvis — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 01:06:00 +0000

Ann,
It’s about the pricing and underlying economics: pricing on cost vs. pricing on value.

By: AnnB

AnnB — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:50:36 +0000

Am I the only one who thinks this is a ridiculously silly piece?

Does anyone honestly believe people are buying paper when they buy a book? Or a blank CD when they buy an album?

Yes, there are all sorts of interesting points to discuss when it comes to price and value of publishing products, but arguing that people have never paid for content is just reductio ad absurdum.

By: Yannick Roehlly (yannick1974) 's status on Monday, 21-Sep-09 22:59:42 UTC - Identi.ca

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:59:50 +0000

[...] http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/09/19/did-we-ever-pay-for-content/ a few seconds ago from choqoK [...]

By: Jeff Jarvis

Jeff Jarvis — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:29:23 +0000

The market, no?

By: Matt Churchill

Matt Churchill — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:53:37 +0000

This is spot on Jeff, did you ever hear of a newspaper having extra pages to accomodate all of the day’s news on one day, then less on another because there were less stories?

It’s all about filling pages – the medium – rather than the actual content or the quality of the content, which is just a vehicle to sell the medium.

By: Mina

Mina — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:40:30 +0000

Who decides what is “good” or “better” content?