While anything can change, the words you consume on Space Force 7 are in fact, free. Most of the words you have read or will read will either be free or you will pay for them.
Free content is not new, it has been around for at least a couple hundred years; the newspaper you used to buy for thirty-five cents, cost about thirty-five cents to print and distribute. You paid for the actual lump of paper, which you could later use to wrap fish, clean windows or train a puppy. The words on that newspaper were typically free to you, the advertisers in the newspaper were happy to pay for the words in the hope that you would spend some of your paycheck on their goods and services. When you bought a book for five bucks, or twenty bucks, you likely paid for both the printing, the paper and the words.
Now, the internet contains both types of words. Sometimes they are free, and supported by the advertisers who want you to spend part of your paycheck on their goods and services. Sometimes the words are only accessible after you pay a monthly fee … and the publishers would argue that the fee compares to the cost of what it would have cost to distribute those words in a newspaper. In some cases, a print component still exists.
Of course, they can and should charge whatever they can, but they will fail eventually, once the generation dies off that supports this kind of thing. In their failure to develop a cost model that takes advantage of their zero-dollar printing costs for their internet content, they will harvest plenty of egg-headed National Public Radio fans, but their base will eventually erode, because comparable content is usually available for free, even if the user has to connect a few of the dots. Yes, paid can compete with free in the short term, but social guilt and bait-switch is a lousy way to build an industry.
The reader sees her children consume videos both informative and entertaining, and she sighs that her children just aren’t readers. She buys them some books which they will read, but they wouldn’t spend their own money on too many of those when they can obtain equal and superior words at the cost of skipping a few ads. She sits next to her husband in the electric vehicle in the garage, they listen to Sunday afternoon NPR. They hold hands for a moment, and then they both take out their phones to send their affiliate some money for the fund drive.
These new word-hawkers, they know the process well enough to stay viable for a few more decades, but it’s a twilight industry; it’s tough to compete with something nearly free.And those ads, they require very little emotional input, at least compared to the few thousand fundraising emails and letters that our couple will receive of the next few years, each one tweaked by an industrial psychologist who knows how to increase response through emotional involvement.
Ultimately, the artifice is undeniable. Sure, the newsroom still has costs. But the costs for the internet readers does not include a few million bucks worth of full-web offset printing, paper and delivery. These were the things to which the publishers raised their glasses in 1997. I once shared swigs of Bundaberg rum from an Aussie publisher’s bottle as we sat on the hill overlooking the 1997 Australia Open practice sessions. He said to me, “Mate, I sold an ad today for our website. I didn’t even know what to charge them, it was just for the website, the client didn’t want it in print. I used to give away the website ads for free when they bought a print ad, I guess I have to come up with a whole new model for this kind of thing. I have to learn how to sell something for a lot of money which costs little.”
Whelp, here we are … the stuff that used to cost little now costs much, the print component becomes less critical to the process, and we haven’t change the model yet. Some of the titans of the newspapering industry, they have already signed their own death warrants. C’est la vie.