AOL Money & Finance

free content posts

Feed

Google lays the foundation for charging for content

In Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, he makes a compelling argument for why many products and services should be free (or, will inevitably become free). Of course, the driving force of this trend is Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), which has figured out how to generate billions from free offerings.

So, this is why it's puzzling that Google is thinking about building technologies to allow for the purchase of content. What's going on here? Well, it may be that Google realizes it needs to be more political in how it deals with much-needed constituencies, such as the newspaper industry.

Continue reading Google lays the foundation for charging for content

NYT TimesSelect becomes freely available

As I've already covered on BloggingStocks, the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) has been considering getting rid of its premium online service, New York TimesSelect, for several weeks. According to an article in today's New York Post, the TimesSelect content has finally been "freed." The article goes on to state that the service will be discontinued once "software issues associated with making the switch to a free service" is resolved.

TimesSelect
was a paid service that allowed readers to access the works of the most prominent and widely-followed New York Times columnists. Pricing for this product was less than $50 per year, but in today's blogging age the internet is loaded with free media and very few people were interested in paying up for newspaper content. As a result, the service's subscriber count fell to about 221,000 in June, down from 224,000 in April.

This move makes perfect sense. The age of paying for content on the internet is slowly losing its appeal to both publishers and readers. Publishers can reach a much wider audience and oftentimes monetize users at nearly the same rates with today's advertising solutions while readers are happy to receive the free information.

Symbol Lookup
IndexesChangePrice
DJIA+44.2910,291.26
NASDAQ+15.822,166.90
S&P 500+5.501,098.51

Last updated: November 12, 2009: 05:49 AM

BloggingStocks Exclusives

Hot Stocks

DailyFinance Headlines

Latest from BloggingBuyouts

WalletPop Headlines

AOL Business News

BioHealth Investor Headlines

Sponsored Links

My Portfolios

Track your stocks here!

Find out why more people track their portfolios on AOL Money & Finance then anywhere else.

BloggingStocks Partners

More from AOL Money & Finance