No Free Lunch

[WordWalker]

When will the major media content providers and publishers integrate "Pay to Crawl" (P2C) into their monetization business models?

For example, newspapers shouldn't be considering a surcharge to their readers for accessing online content. It's the Internet information behemoths who line their corporate pockets with ad revenue that formerly went to the newspaper publishers that should pay for the right to crawl and index third party news content.

How many Pulizters has Google, Yahoo and Microsoft won lately?

 

[dgridley]

I think it's a big mistake to start charging fo access.. it's bound to backfire on the lot of them.

 

[maxeaus]

I take it you are referring to Rupert Murdoch's push to monetise content. I am strongly opposed to it. The Internet, to me anyway, represents a playing field where anyone can become a successful publisher without a large bank roll behind them.

Places like Wikipedia which are free and authoritative are what the Internet should be about IMO, where people can find out facts without paying. This is not to say a revenue model dose not have it's place, it dose, but the advertiser model, AdSense, subscriptions etc also works well, for quality content.

The issue i have with Murdoch is that his content is often thinly disguised as propaganda, and has political leanings to whomever is or isn't in favour. If i wanted to know the facts of a story or issue, i would not read it or watch it on a Murdoch platform.

IMO Murdoch has a bad habit of overpaying for Internet assets that are risky, such as myspace, which soon lost favour to facebook for example. I don't see why Internet readers/users should pay Murdoch for his questionable acquisitions.

Bottom line is i wont be paying to read/watch anything Murdoch has online.

 

[dgridley]

I certainly won't be paying for info I can find elsewhere for free.. these guys are doomed to failure unless they offer something unique and exclusive. :IMHO: