Paying for quality

The Red Deer Advocate, the local daily paper announced last week  that it was making its online local content available by subscription. Paying for internet content has always bothered some people. After all, we pay our internet bill like our cable bill and we have to put up with advertising right? But the internet is different than traditional media. You still have to pay the staff, and you have to pay them competitively. In order to pay staff, you need to make money (and lets face it, profit is also a factor) and paying 5cents a hit in advertising doesn't exactly equal a lot of money.

So I will pay for online subscriptions. Its like a traditional magazine. And internet subscriptions tend to be substantially cheaper than magazines. But I think the most important thing when it comes to paying for internet content is that it has to demonstrate quality. Since there is so much competition with free sources, the paid source needs to be substantially better than the free source. I see a lot of internet sites that ask for subscriptions or 'donations' and I give to very few. The truth is that the free sources out there are of just as good of quality.

So the Advocate has just raised the bar for itself. If it wants to attract readers (and not loose the ones it has) it has to make sure that the local news that is available online is just as good, if not better, than what is in print. And to be honest, most of their online local content wasn't that good before it went subscriper based - it was better in the newspaper. Other media sources in town are already boasting that they will keep their local online information. The gauntlet has been dropped. So what I hope is that the Advocate will rise to the challenge and Red Deer will see better online information available.