Lars Bastholm has a post in BW proposing an alternative model to advertising to save the media industry. He wants to see the ISPs and mobile carriers charging a content fee to provide access to content.
The signs are everywhere. The New York Times is close to bankruptcy. Magazines are dying in droves. The music industry is trying anything to make a buck. The TV networks are wondering if they can keep selling increasingly expensive space in return for an increasingly smaller audience that time-shifts its way out of having to watch the ads. Meanwhile, business plans that held the words “advertising funded” are being rewritten, while multitudes of newspapers and content sites are closing down because of lack of income. News Corp. (NWS) Chairman Rupert Murdoch said recently, though, that he plans to charge readers for content at all the company’s Web sites. It already charges for The Wall Street Journal, but Murdoch plans to extend that model to FoxNews.com, as well as newspapers like the New York Post and The Times of London.
Maybe it’s time to take a deep breath and accept that the idea that advertising can support the entire content industry is a fallacy.
What we need is a payment model that rewards the content creators and feels free for consumers. It sounds incompatible, but maybe there’s a way that makes this work out for both parties.
What I propose is that phone companies and Internet providers just slap additional content fees onto their bills. Sure, I don’t like the additional fee. But if a $10 monthly content fee was added to both my existing AT&T and Time Warner bills, and in return I got access to all the content I wanted, it would feel pretty close to free.
While a provocative thought, this is not going to happen. This would require that all the pipes companies (ISPs, mobile carriers etc.) to buy into this. They also need the media companies to work with the pipes companies. Most importantly it assumes that subscribers will put up with this content fee. Not gonna happen.
This model was already tried and it failed remember. It was called AOL.