The end of paid, the end of free

The big news for online content creators this week is of course the New York Times abandoning its foolish paywall (coupled with speculation that the other bastion of paid news content, WSJ.com, will go free under its new management). Is this the end (or the beginning of the end or what have you) for the paywall? Of course not. The NYT announcement came on the same day HotOrNot announced that it would have to abandon its own free model and go back to charging users to send and receive messages after being deluged with spam. Craigslist continues to charge for listings wherever spoofing volumes have made it necessary. As one paywall comes down another goes up: this is not a virtual Berlin Wall moment, just some virtual fences moving to where they're needed from where they should never have been.

But wait - surely this is a false analogy? Reading NYT articles is not the same thing as sending messages to other users of a dating site or listing jobs and apartments on a classified website.

Today, I'm not so sure. A lot of the value in the NYT's (or anyone's) content is the commentary that accompanies it, from blogs and in comments and anywhere else that links back to the original reporting. Take a look at the number of articles that Techmeme alone tracks back on this one NYT article announcing the end of the paywall. I don't have time to read all of them, so I've cherry-picked the ones by authors whose reputation proceeds them and probably missed some important insights. That's the same problem that HotOrNot just reinstated its paywall to solve, or that Craigslist's revenue model continues to solve - sorting through the messages I want to read and winnowing the ones I probably don't.

By which I mean - it seems that people won't pay to read (most) content. But they'll pay to create it, in all sorts of different forums and formats. Perhaps when it set out to monetise its content NYT just tried to charge the wrong people for the wrong thing.