Free Web Content a "Myth," Claims Barry Diller 294
BotScout writes "Following in the footsteps of other traditional media executives who just don't get it, Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of IAC/InterActiveCorp, said web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, and that's that. The media and technology executive said it's 'mythology' to view the Internet as a system of free communications. 'It is not free, and is not going to be,' Diller said yesterday at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Pasadena, California. Companies from Disney to New York Times Co. are seeking ways to extract revenue from the Internet. The latter recently said that it's considering a $5 monthly fee for access to its namesake newspaper's web site."
Re:You'll never get my money! (Score:4, Informative)
No kidding. People barely tolerate having to register at the NYT website and that's free. If they actually expect that people are going to be willing to pay money to read it, they're going to be in for quite a shock.
thats IAC the spyware company (Score:4, Informative)
fuck him and his company, (we) have spent thousands of hours removing his companies shit from our network
they target kids especially
http://www.benedelman.org/spyware/ask-toolbars/ [benedelman.org]
http://www.google.com/search?q=iac+spyware [google.com]
I would gladly pay $5 for the NYT online (Score:3, Informative)
I used to have a delivery subscription for ~$5/wk but I canceled it a while ago because it was nothing but extra clutter. When I canceled, I told the rep that I still greatly value the paper's content and would not mind continuing to pay some small amount to keep it going but, alas, they were incapable of taking my money without sending paper to my doorstep.
$5/month seems eminently reasonable, I hope they do something like that.
The contrarian view... (Score:1, Informative)
So I'm an anonymous coward and I'm going to disagree with nearly all the posts, so let me predict either -1 or nothing higher than a 2...
Firstly, the mistake everyone here is making is that they assume they know what the business model and therefore thee economics of Dilley's production is. I'll wager that he's crunched the numbers and the $5 he's put out there isn't just some random number.
Secondly, I'm pretty sure he's factored in less users once he starts a paid service. But maybe that's not such a bad idea. If you have a paid for service and you lose 80% of your users (random high number), so long as what the remaining 20% pay covers the bills and gives you a profit, what do you care for the other 80%? Fact of the matter is, the paid subscribers will probably see a better service because there is less load on the web infrastructure supporting the content, possibly allowing for further cost savings and profit driving.
Third, yes, there's a lot of free content out there, more each day. But how much of it is worthwhile? I was going to say probably 80% of the internet could disappear and nobody would notice, but then there would be no online porn industry ;) The point being that there's an awful lot of noise out there on the great big www. I'd be curious to see a distribution graph of the web sites with the most hits from google: do 20% get 80% of hits or is it flat?
Whilst slashdot serves its purpose, it is nothing but a vehicle for delivering access to other content, thus it has no reporters or journalists to pay. Buy a copy of the Wall Street Journal, read it from cover to cover. Or if you're in Europe, get a copy of the Financial Times (England) or similar.
So long as people with money continue to see value in purchasing something (be it news or otherwise), then people will continue to sell it. Whilst slashdot is free, that it is free is relevant becaues of the open source community that it serves first and foremonst. When someone comes up with a "free" NYT or WSJ or FT and it is first rate original content, then maybe I'll buy the "free will conquer all" story. But for now, free news on the internet is no more or less worthwhile than the free news you get with free to air television.
What he was really saying (Score:3, Informative)
... was that you're not going to see content that is paid for through your ISP subscription. You pay the ISP for bandwidth. You pay a content provider to decide which bits are ones and zeros. He didn't rule out advertising as a means to pay for content. He didn't even rule out good-will as a means to pay (he just didn't figure in things like free open source because it's just not in his sphere of thinking).
Which of you readers of Slashdot is going to put up a popular web site and run it totally free to access and entirely devoid of content? And I don't mean some puny little personal blog page. I mean a major popular site with a million visits an hour. Unless you are already filthy rich and want to blow it on this, it ain't gonna happen. And if you do fit that category, the site still isn't free because whoever you ripped off to get rich is paying for it.
Barry Diller track record (Score:4, Informative)
Let's look at the record of Barry Diller companies.
So you can see where Diller is coming from. His ad-based businesses have been disasters, while his transaction-charge businesses have done well. (Lending Tree had some bad years because they speculated in mortgages, instead of just brokering them.)
Re:I would gladly pay $5 for the NYT online (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
"There is simply no model right now that supports the free distribution of movies that cost $140 million to make and would additional require huge amounts of bandwidth to distribute."
True, but a lot of people are now watching five minute shorts made by their peers for youtube instead. So, times change. And some people are even making much longer things for youtube or other venues.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
Christian Science [wikipedia.org] != Scientology [wikipedia.org].