Maggie's Farm

One of the great mysteries of the internet is the idea that 'free' sells. It does, too, forcing large companies to give more free content and base their income on what it has been based on for decades: advertising.

The world of porn is leading the way, as it has for awhile, with 'free' homemade porn now getting more hits/views than the slickly produced, but relatively plastic sort of porn. Some sites are even publicly giving un-airbrushed images (no photo rendition beyond generic color balance) to show that beauty can be seen in pores and moles... mind you they have to follow the free folks who get more views, more clicks, don't ask for payments and have scads of ads. And the free blog and image/video content is swamping the payfor stuff, too.

The NYT not only had to pull down its subsciption wall, but is now offering scanned material in their archives going at least as far back as 1907 if not earlier. The multi-page stories now get put into pdf and made available for searching via OCR extraction of text for metadata. It isn't 100%, yet, but reading that old content makes me really scratch my head at the current NYT.

Big printing presses will still be needed for content distribution for a decade at least. The first of the thin-film displays are, however, starting to appear and after that the question is rendition and resolution. Get resolution up to that seen in high-end screens for photo work today at low price and on thin film and you will kill newspapers... the reason is that thin film or other methods become display surfaces to add into other things.

Fusing now is seeing folks like Baen books giving out free old material which, strangely, increases sales of those books for higher long-term royalties. Newspapers don't get that, but they will get links and readers coming for full articles quoted elsewhere. Pushing that out for 'free' means that you get more readers and more views and, possibly, some longer term viewers coming back for other content. Blogs and blogging communities that can generate their own verifiable and reliable content will do the same. As the internet moves from its radial star pattern to a more internetworked cloud pattern, the connections and trust networks will become 'lateral' not towards portals and big sites. Older sites will still exist, but new communities will augment and often replace them over a decade or two.

The internet, by being many-to-many and not one-to-many, is changing about how we think of news, reviews, communities and corporate structure. That has already started... expect it to continue.