What I love about Chris Anderson is that he is always precisely on point with his predictions and observations. In his recent interview with Charlie Rose, he talks about the difference between the Wall Street Journal’s and NYTimes’ internet strategies. This is a point I’ve wanted to make for quite awhile but just couldn’t phrase quite as effectively. He makes two directly opposing viewpoints when considering the closed nature of Wsj.com’s web offering.
On the one hand he notes that infomation wants to be free saying, “Some wants to be free and some wants to be really expensive… Commodity information [the type Wsj.com offers] needs to be free, or they’re not in the conversation.” On the other, he notes that the WSJ’s culture may not be ready for a free web offering. Both points are valid, but to what extent? Is it more important to adhere to the rules of the web and offer a useful product (he goes on to say that, “The job of every print publication is to add value to the web”), or do you stick to your brand?
Wall Street Journal is for all intents and purposes a luxury brand. With that realization, the question that must then be posed is: how do you port your customer’s/subscriber’s real-life experience to the internet? It seems that Wsj.com has decided to attempt to retain some of their core sensibilities by keeping their content subscription based, and thus out of reach of most heavy internet users who are by nature averse to paying for content. The NYTimes on the other hand has taken a much more populist approach and kept the bulk of their website free, thus dominating Wsj.com in most site statistics including: Google Page Rank, Traffic Rank, Blog Rank, Inbound Links, Google Indexed Pages, and del.icio.us Bookmarks (via Website Grader).
Side Note: At the very end of the interview, Anderson mentioned the future of America’s economy/competitive edge. In the most concise way I’ve heard yet, he summed it up saying, “Everything I believe is written on the back of the iPhone, ‘Designed in California, made in China.”
1 response so far ↓
Arthur Frischman // March 8, 2008 at 11:50 am
The more sites that rely on advertising, the low ad rates go thus the less revenue generated from advertising. The top 4-5 sites take 95% of ad revenue … that doesn’t leave a lot for the rest.
It isn’t that people will not pay for content, they just don’t want to pay for it in the form it is currently being offered.