Does Advertising Age Not Get It?
I was going to write this morning about how magazines in the general market are moving away from print and toward online. The link to the story that inspired the post is here.
Yeah, that’s right:
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Are you kidding me?! Is a magazine about advertising and marketing that clueless? Seriously?
Since the beginning of the Internet, there has been one rock solid rule with regard to paid content online: People will only pay for two kinds of content on the Internet – pornography and the Wall Street Journal.
And even the WSJ is making more of their content freely accessible.
As Fred Wilson put it, with respect to the WSJ:
Here’s the deal. Digital media is not about scarcity and never will be. That’s the old media game. Online it’s about ubiquity, about being part of the conversation, about links, authority, page rank, and if you are a news organization like the WSJ - its about anchoring the discussion.
At least once a week I bookmark something in AdAge with the intention of linking to the story in a blog post. Then when I write the story I get that stupid “Subscribe now!” message and have to go find an alternative source. What does AdAge gain out of that? Nothing.
I’m not going to pay for content when all the information in the world is available online for free somewhere else.