In the early days if the Internet, established traditional content sources sensed that they needed to have an online presence, and were willing to offer it for free.
Later, as online versions of their content began to bleed away significant revenues from their paper-based offerings, they decided they needed to start making people pay to access the paperless ones, too. And as everyone in the world of paper peridocials "knew," the way to generate reliable, significant income was via subsriptions. Problem solved!
Except it wasn't. Who believes that reliable content sources which present writing in both elelctronic and hardcopy form are getting healthier these days?
What publishing traditionalists haven't yet come to realize is that most of the historical conditions, requirements, and techniques for profitably producing newspapers and magazines have now fallen by the wayside.
To begin with, the costs of printing and distributing the material have evaporated, since only one physical copy of a virtual publication now needs to exist, and everyone can comfortably read it at the same time.
In addition, the web provides a "virtual newsstand" of infinite size, where lightweight individual pieces of content will never blow away in the wind, and the newsstand operator doesn't need to squint at each item to determine its price.
Most important of all, there's no inherent reason anymore why people should have to pay to read every piece in a particular issue of a magazine, when they're really only interested in one or two. And there's even less of a reason to pay in advance for a full year's supply.
In a web-enabled world, it's much more likely—and natural—that a consumer will want to read a few articles in Magazine A, a few more from Newspaper B, and so forth.
Once publishers come to see this, they'll be better able to embrace the concept of a shared service that charges people only for what they choose to read. At this point, they'll also be more likely to appreciate that the hurdles to implementing such a service are merely technical—and not especially high.
