By Bob Jenkins
I am the sort of guy everyone dreads of running into in a bar. No, I am not a drunk, and yes, I always dig deep when it’s my round, and I can say with total honesty that I have never been involved in any sort of physical altercation on licensed premises. The truth is much worse than any of these things.
The truth is … I listen to other people’s conversations, and, if I find them interesting, I cannot stop myself from joining in; whether my fellow drinkers want me to or not. It’s bad of me, I know, and I have tried to stop myself from doing it but I can’t.
I tell you this because reading of News Corp’s plan to start charging for online content, a move which seems destined to be quickly copied by just about everybody who has content for which they may be able to charge.
In the bar of what used to be called the Lowes Hotel in Monte Carlo, many years ago during the late, and speaking personally, entirely unlamented, Monte Carlo Television Market, I was guilty of my aforementioned indiscretion. The subject of conversation was a CBS miniseries called Lonesome Dove. A Western, based on a series of four novels by Larry McMurtry, it had just become the highest rated miniseries in the history of American television.
The two guys who I was about to interrupt couldn’t understand how this kind of success had come from a Western. After all, they reasoned, Westerns are passé; they‘ve had their day. No one watches Westerns any more. I couldn’t resist. “The reason that Lonesome Dove has been so successful has nothing to do with the fact that it’s a Western,” I chimed in, uninvited. “The reason people have been watching it by the wagon load (I couldn’t resist that one either!) is because it is good content. It is well written, well directed, well acted, well edited. In short, it’s well made and people like to watch well made content.”
The truth Lonesome Dove illustrated is that people do not watch rubbish – if something is bad, they hit the remote and find something better. Always have, and always will.
And therein lies a truth about the Internet that I believe has not been fully appreciated. The Internet is a technological revolution, and that revolution has created immense novelty. Nothing remotely like chat rooms and social networking sites ever existed before, and that gave them an attraction independent of what was actually on offer. And while theft has been with us a while longer, file sharing was a new and sexy way of stealing, and even allowed some of the more morally and intellectually feeble amongst us to persuade themselves they weren’t actually doing anything wrong. And, of course, everything was free.
And here’s an interesting thing about “free.” Yes, it is attractive; yes, it pulls in large numbers of punters, but the bottom line is this: You don’t value what you don’t pay for. And that’s why News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch is right to start charging, and everyone else should join him as soon as possible.
This may seem counterintuitive – but it is true. The content on sites such as the Wall Street Journal is professionally produced and valuable. The user-generated content on social networking sites isn’t. By making the former free you elevate the latter to the same standing. By charging for professionally produced quality content, the industry will be drawing a line in the sand, forcing people to choose between rubbish for free or quality at a price. And, overwhelmingly, audiences will most likely choose quality. It’s just that while there are five or six national networks giving quality content to audiences for free (while asking advertisers to pay for it) makes sense, adopting the same model in a universe where you’re just one of a few billion web sites doesn’t.
Two and two always make four, even if it we are only now learning to count in the exciting new world of the Internet.
