Last week, as Microsoft's crisp and witty online magazine Slate (www.slate.com) flip-flopped back to a free publication after a year as a subscription-only journal, Web-watchers were reminded that the ruling doctrine of the Internet world still holds true: information wants to be free.
First proposed by writer and Net documenter Mr Stewart Brand, the phrase has been repeated so often now that its authorship is mostly forgotten and it has assumed the position of a bona fide Web cliche. Like many cliches, it doesn't look like it will lose its truthfulness anytime soon, either. As many have pointed out, in the Web's topsy-turvy economic model (at least the one which exists so far in this young medium), only sex and stocks can make the punters pay.
No matter that people will dig into their pockets without a whimper in the real world for newspapers and magazines, books, music, advice and games. In the virtual world, only pornographic images and access to an assortment of real-time stock services, such as up-to-the-minute price quotes and the facility to buy and sell shares, have been granted financial value.
Mr Brand's rule makes for one of the great conundrums of the Web "content" business - how do you possibly make money from it? After all, only within the past year have people in any significant numbers decided they're willing to buy concrete items like books, CDs and computer equipment over the Web. Selling content is another issue entirely, an odd twist, given that one might assume people would be readier to buy digital content on a digital medium than use it to order something as old-fashioned as a book.
To imagine the frustration of the would-be content merchants, just transfer the online content model into the bricks-and-mortar world. Imagine having a shop full of goods which people - thousands, even millions of people - want and for which no one will pay even a nominal sum. And it's not as if they are going elsewhere to buy, either. All your competitors are in the same baffling situation.
However, if you give people the goods for free, they all will come to your store. Now, your job is to figure out another way of making money from them once you have a captive audience. This isn't as bizarre as it sounds - in America, the entire cable television industry is built around such a model.
Customers get a special electronic box which sits on the TV and enables them to receive programmes (unlike here, where you simply plug into a cable connection installed by a cable company). The box is actually worth a couple of hundred dollars but is given away free. Cable companies recoup that expenditure many times over through subscriptions, advertising and deals with broadcasters.
The obvious route for Web content sites is to offer their audiences to advertisers. Unfortunately, so far that hasn't panned out, for reasons, as with so much in the Net business, that aren't particularly clear. Audiences rarely click through on ads to the advertiser sites - under 5 per cent - and ads don't seem to carry the same impact as they do in other media, such as television, print or radio.
About a year ago, Slate's parent, Microsoft, decided to close the online journal's content to all but subscribers, who would pay $19.95 (€22.15) a pop. Some 30,000 people decided Slate's content was worth it, and if it were sitting on a magazine rack at the local newsagents, it undoubtedly would be.
Slate, as its editor Mr Michael Kinsley acknowledges in his interesting explanation of its return to freedom (www.slate.com/Readme/99-0213/Readme.asp), guessed wrongly that Web audiences were ready to pay for the journal's award-winning, intelligent mix of politics, reviews, satire, media-watching, and general punditry.
At the same time, no one had really tested the subscription-only waters for a high-profile publication like Slate. Microsoft has deep pockets for underwriting the journal, and clearly figured it might as well see if Web audiences would now accept such a business model.
The answer was a definite "no". Yet to date, not a single online magazine or newspaper site is making a profit based upon flogging advertising to its audience even though audiences like those for Slate and Salon fall into the most desirable marketing sectors.
Thus it looks like Slate will follow in its critic Salon's path, opting for advertising and "services" like a paid-subscription members club, special products like mugs and t-shirts (even a blend of coffee, in Salon's case), partnership arrangements with bookstores, travel sites, and other merchants, and so on. For the time being, it's a curious jumble-sale approach to staying alive while online consumers clearly still want their information to be free.
Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie
