Paid content is any digital content for which you have to pay. Paid content is largely accessible as a one time purchase or on a subscription basis.
Depending on what you use the internet for, you many never have come across paid content. Indeed with so much for free content on the internet you may well ask yourself why you need paid content?
Paid Content: News No Longer Free?
Paid content is currently very much in the news with the Murdoch empire, News Corp, considering changing access to news to be only available as paid content. Murdoch is joined by The New York Times and a raft of other US based dailies looking to place all or some of their websites behind a paid content wall.
Murdoch himself has been quoted as saying “The current days of the internet [news] will soon be over” and that newspapers would have to evolve if they wanted to survive. Other UK based newspapers have mooted the idea of placing content behind pay walls and FT.com has had a paid content model for several years now.
Paid Content for News: Will It Work?
Still early days and hard to determine. There appears to be growing impetus for newspapers to consolidate and work together for paid content. The US wave may hit the UK and we’ll have to keep tabs on whether paid content will fully take hold.
Paid Content: The Ones We Know
While the concept of news content having to be purchased is still new to most and arguably a concept hard to accept, paid content exists in other forms that we are more likely to be familiar with.
Music is a digital media that has worked well with the paid content model. Music is regularly bought online as downloadable content for which we pay.
Equally screensavers, gadgets, applications and the such can be seen as paid content. Pay and you can access a huge variety of content.
Reports and information to which added value has been created are also very common and typically these are accessed by subscription or purchasing individual reports.
Content aggregators and specialist research firms provide data, reports and analysis. As these reports have added value the paid content model is not so hard to stomach, in contrast to news articles they have additional input which people are largely happy to purchase.
Piracy and Paid Content
Piracy and fraud is unfortunately rife on the internet. Multimedia as paid content fights a daily battle as there are many people unwilling to buy if it can be accessed for free.
Software providers are also increasingly targeted by piracy.
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