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Nicholas Carr at Rough Type ponders:
I find myself going back to a question that Martin Nisenholtz, head of the New York Times' digital operation, asked at the start of the conference: "How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don't want to pay at all?" The difficulty is confirmed by a recent report in Red Herring on efforts to find out how what students regard as a reasonable price point for music:
Michael Weiss, chief executive of StreamCast Networks, which runs the peer-to-peer service Morpheus, a frequent RIAA target, said his company had polled students about how much they would be willing to pay for music and found an unwillingness to pay at all.
“We finally came to the conclusion that there is a cultural cost of paying for music,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s $0.20. There’s a cultural cost, just as there’s a cultural cost of giving up your credit card or going into an environment where you might be the only one on the dance floor.” Carr continued:
It's not just, or even primarily, a question of whether quality content can bubble up or drip down from the blogospheric puddle-cloud - of course it can. It's a question of the types of quality content that can be supported by the new media economics that the internet is creating. There are kinds of quality content that individuals can produce on their own - opinions, reactions, live conference reports, etc. - and there are different, maybe more important kinds of quality content that require the sort of coordination and investment that only institutions can provide. Being an enabler of the Myspace world - a cloud-seeder, tool-provider, and passive filter - may well be the role of the successful news organization of the future. But what a diminished role it is.
posted by James DeLong @ 10:27 AM | Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation
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