Paid content: From free to fee

Abstract

Paid content has become a hotly debated issue since the dotcom crisis started in 2000. The predicted new economy did not become a lasting reality; Internet departments started to weigh heavily on the budgets of content creators; advertisements, whose volume had just started to grow, decreased dramatically. These developments were aggravated by the lack of proper micro-payment methods and technology to prevent illegal copying. Yet it is rather remarkable that the issue of paid content is limited to the Internet. Before the Internet, paid content was not an issue for professional and consumer online services. For the providers of mobile content, there has never been a question of to pay or not to pay. It looks as if the Internet industry has created a ten year pause in paid content, before the pendulum now returns from free to fee. This chapter presents a short history of paid content, looks at the issue of what characterises valuable content, makes a categorisation, and shows developments in the field of content. The issue of paid content will be limited to the discussion of content to be paid for and will not treat content supported by advertisements. Paid content will be treated along two lines: paid content on the Internet, and paid content for mobile services. This comparison is chosen intentionally as some content items - such as newspapers and magazines, music, or television broadcasts of sports - are fighting to get hold of the two platforms. The reader should keep in mind that there has never been a discussion about paying for scientific, technical, and medical content as well as certain trade information. The issue of paid content concentrates now mainly on trade information and consumer content such as music, games, and movies. The figures presented in this report are concerned with new Internet sites and not with already existing information services such as Lexis- Nexis and Thomson Dialog. © Springer Berlin - Heidelberg 2005.