A friend expressed to me recently his confusion over free. “How is anything free?” he mused. “Nothing can be really free.” But what about Facebook? Gmail? What about the notion in Chris Anderson’s “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” (Wired Magazine: 16.03) that the Web is all about scale and if the costs can be spread over a large enough audience, something of value can essentially be had for free?
The New York Times announced today that it intends to charge frequent readers for access to its website starting in 2011. A number of weeks ago, Rupert Murdoch announced that many of News Corp’s online media properties would soon begin charging visitors, a reality that all online publishers are faced with in the post-dawn of the ad revenue model.
But let’s face it. Facebook and Gmail are not free. Anderson reminds us of what Stewart Brand said in 1984: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive … That tension will not go away.” Facebook and Google, Gmail’s parent company, each in its own way have monetized that tension.
Google knows a shocking amount about your computer and where it goes: every keyword search you conduct, every website you visit, your IP address, where you’re physically located, and even more if you use services like Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, etc., ad infinitum. Your use of Google is not free. You give Google a lot of useful information.
Facebook knows the real you. If you’re one of over 350 million who use Facebook, you’ve voluntarily shared with Facebook the most valuable information on the Web: your profile information. Facebook knows your name, who your friends are, that you like to hike and bike, that you read Ayn Rand and Anne Rice, that your political views are complicated, and what your status is. So Facebook isn’t free either.
These are two distinct classes of information on the Web, and they drive most marketing that occurs online. Profile information, tucked relatively safely away in username and password-protected environments like Facebook, allows for ads to be served to you based on your specific interests. It’s called behavioral targeting. Search engine information, tucked away in its own protected etherworld, allows search engines to deliver to you the most relevant ads based on search behavior, yours and others.
So why does the New York Times have to charge its subscribers? Because they’re giving away their content for nothing in return. As the New York Times decides exactly how and what they’ll charge its users, they should also consider the value of profile information and site search information. They should supplement their site with a social media component and give every user the option signing up with the same kind of information that is shared on sites like Facebook. These users will be given more free access to the site and will be served highly targeted ads based on their profile information and on their page view history on the site. Users who opt not to sign up will have to pay to read.
NYTimes.com has never been free. It’s been paying the price for us, and soon we’re going to have to give them something in return to make this relationship work.
