12 ms·

I don't think the guy on the street buying a news paper thinks to himself "good thing I had a dollar to pay someone for distributing all this free news content

• thwarted 17y ago
  It's not what people have actually paid for, it's what they think they've been paying for. They think they've been getting news for a quarter or a dollar, when their subscription price goes up because they arn't just paying for distribution anymore, but rather all the things that advertising used to pay for, will they not perceive that as an increase in the cost of the news?
  • RyanMcGreal 17y ago
    > It's not what people have actually paid for, it's what they think they've been paying for. I would argue that the distinction is irrelevant in this case. If the news was priced according to the cost of creating content tomorrow, the number of buyers would be correspondingly smaller than it is today.
• RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  If the price of the newspaper suddenly included the cost of producing the content, you can be damn sure the guy on the street would notice the difference.
• joe_the_user 17y ago
  That might have been true before but it's not true now. The guy on the street who also cruises the web thinking that, except it's more like "I'm bored without PC, let's toss a quarter out to see what the filter wants to put out". And the thing is, THIS is how it's been for a while, long before the Internet. The Internet only made it obvious. So the genie fortunately isn't going back into the bottle. Nice genie, it bring us good stuff.