Bundling & Selling Content (Search engine software)
The WSJ let the “our content will be free” story spread for months to generate public relations related coverage and to misdirect competitors before announcing that they are going to keep their subscription service:
Mr. Murdoch made his latest comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in answering a question. “We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of The Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering” for subscribers, he said. “The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive.”
The Wall Street Journal has enough trust, connections, and signifigance to keep charging for their best stuff.
Many other websites do to, but as exclusive content rather than part of a package. Bundling packages of similar content channels (like blog feeds) will not work for the following reasons:
- there is already virtually an unlimited amount of competition that is free
- the free content plays an important role in making it easy to subscribe
- Easy subscriptions provies lots of subscribers, social proof of value, and limited risk to subscribers. From those, cumulative advantage kicks in.
- Free content cuts marketing costs to ~ $0.
- People hate micropayments.
- Taste is personal. Some people who like sites similar to this one absolutely despise me. And the other way around is true.
- The incremental cost of having more customers means that you need to charge more than $1 if you are going to establish a sustainable relationship with them.
The Spamification of Trusted Words, Ideas, & Organizations
I am going to go on record offering you this powerful life-changing advice that will be the most valuable information you ever consumed. Sound familiar?
If you pay attention to spam you can view the trends and see where it is going before it even goes there. One of the big trends that is rarely talked about is how hard spammers hunt hard to find credible sounding words. In spite of being on the do not call list, every day I get a call from the message center, the card center, the consumer center, or the national consumer protection foundation, etc.
If at the core the business model was created to annoy people and steal from them then the people behind these outfits are going to be results oriented, using whatever techniques they find profitable (auto-dialers, powerful words, fake partnerships with trusted bodies, etc), until they burn away the profit margins.
Some words (and even formats) get so polluted that the perception of value goes down. Free killer ebook to change your world forever…chuck full of affiliate links for products not worth buying. Ebooks take more effort to create than web pages do, and so they were once somewhat trusted, but over time have been associated with spam because the format has been abused. Online video is fairly new, but it is already being heavily abused.
Trusted names and charities partner with businesses to extend out the public relations campaigns of the businesses. As featured in loses its value when anyone can go write a column. Consumer generated content is bolted onto mainstream media sites, but how much of it is as good as leading independent channels? The people who really have something to say probably already run their own websites, and the primary intent of most people participating on media sites is going to be nefarious in nature. Speaking of that, I just got a good idea. 
On the flip side, some words become valuable because other people significantly invest to create the value behind those words. The value is greatest if you are sitting on the exact .com name that becomes popular, but even if people are propping up words in unrelated markets they still can drive up the value of domains with that word in them. These community sites also drive up the value of short domain names that can support a community of their own.
