Not All Information Wants to Be Free

The idea that people won’t pay for content online has become such a part of the Web orthodoxy that New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller risked getting lynched earlier this month for merely musing about paid models for the online editions of his paper. Not helping Keller’s cogitation was a contemporaneous “secret memo” from Steve Brill and a Time article by Walter Isaacson, both which advocated variations on the micropayment model. Neither advances the topic much beyond what most Web entrepreneurs understood long ago.

Paid content’s failures are well-documented. Slate gave up on the subscriber model in early 1999. The New York Times folded its TimesSelect product of columnists and archives in 2007, concluding a two-year run, even though it was taking in $10 million a year. The latimes.com set free its CalendarLive section of arts, reviews, and listings in May 2005 after a 21-month paid experiment. To name another ambitious venture among the many, the 2000 start-up Inside.com, which charged several hundred dollars a year, failed to attract its 30,000 desired subscribers and expired.

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