News Companies – screwing us or shagging us?

Will all news content always be free?

So as the online world becomes bigger and greater, with more and more information being consumed all day, what will we see happening to these content providers?

In the dawn of the Internet age, we have seen people adding websites about their companies, their lives, their stories, all types on interesting articles have been uploaded onto the World Wide Web. Some companies seeing it as a necessity for them to be online, but with this has come many barriers and problems to existing business models. One big example of this is the music industry, with album sales plummeting due to the fact people getting their music free on the Internet.

“Why pay when it is free”

We have now also started to see this with news publishers. Most newspapers have an online portal for readers to consume as much news as possible for free. Now from this they have started noticing a decline in newspaper sales. Which many have them have seen it as a concern due to the lost revenue but to counteract this they began with online advertising. Which is a good source for income but the main question was…was it enough.

So now we have started to see a trend in paid for content, which the top news people like to see where it should be going and not allowing people to read the news for free, because it could be very lucrative for them. Recently the Newspaper Association of America requested information from Google to see how they can successfully monetize their content but by also not shooting themselves in the foot.

So Google is now starting to develop a mechanism that will be attached to its existing Google checkout system, which will allow users to seamlessly pay for content on a subscription type basis. All though Google claims that most of the revenue will come from advertising, but this will give publishes an additional source of revenue.

So the question at the end of the day is, will we the readers be happy with this decision, will we fork out the money to read the content and do the newspapers really care what the readers think or are they just seeing dollar signs in the eyes.  And another thing, will there be pirated news sites starting to pop up on the web.

So we might start seeing a similar trend in the news industry as we saw in the music on. Because the main question for the consumer will be, why pay when we can get it for free.