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April 16, 2003
Locking Up the Web
By Lance Ulanoff
Recently, the Web sites of People magazine and Entertainment Weekly moved their content behind pay gates. Only magazine subscribers, AOL members, and newsstand buyers (whose use is limited) can view the magazines' content online. This is not surprising news. The trend began a few years ago when the Wall Street Journal Web site shut the gate. It has been repeated by online-only ventures like Salon.com and by the Web arms of print publications large and small. The New York Times on the Web and Newsday.com, for instance, charge for archival content.
In these tough economic times, publications have little choice but to look for new sources of revenue, and I expect many moreââ¬âeven online-only propertiesââ¬âto make similar moves in the coming months and years. That there will be a transition from free to paid content is so obvious, it's almost not worth talking about. What is worth examining, though, is the impact the change will have, over time, on the makeup of the World Wide Web. Bit by bit what was free, now is not; what was readily available, now is viewable only if you pay. What will this mean for those of us who regularly use the Web to do research?
The move from free to fee is not limited to institutional information sources. Formerly free sites that allow people to become members and contribute information, to join discussion forums, or even to build their own simple sites have switched to fee-based systems. As a result, fewer people use these sites, slowing the growth of information on the Web. While these sites might not be where you would go to do hard research, the reduced number of contributors does make the job of finding anecdotal examples or doing a quick, unscientific opinion survey a little harder.
How different will tomorrow's Web be? Let's fast forward to the year 2013, and imagine performing a search. The Web still has hundreds of thousands of free personal sites, but most of the solid, factual, trustworthy information lies behind gates. Search engines may or may not have icons that distinguish pay content from free; my hope is that they will. Even for pay content, you'll still be able to follow links, but you won't be able to see anything beyond an abstract without paying.
Over the last decade or so, the Web has given writers, including this one, a powerful tool for quickly and efficiently researching an incredibly broad range of topics and obtaining reliable information (assuming one uses multiple sources and applies some skepticism). The coming change will force me and others to rethink the way we use the Web for research. Will we have to decide at every site whether to pay, say, $1 per article or, to access unlimited articles, a $4.95 monthly fee? This has the potential to become incredibly expensive, not to mention tedious. I'm hoping that by 2013 there will be large content warehouses that let you pay monthly or yearly fees to access content from many different sites (kind of like LexisNexis but for the broader range of content you find on the Web). This would be much more efficient and cheaper than paying per article or per site.
If such services don't appear, we may see a flood of authors, researchers, and scholars heading back to the library. We all still use libraries, of course, but thanks to the Web, many of us no longer have to schedule long sessions to do piles of research for one or two projects at a time. There are countless documents not stored on the Web, but for new developments, near history, and classic texts (the works of Shakespeare, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, many reference books, and so forth), the Web has become the best source of information.
Tyreman: ...if you control the media you control the people and the country...
J_dupak: In the days of corporate scandals and overpaid CEO's its difficult to have pity for corporations...
jdneal: I myself find the free content I'm getting right now useless.
At this point I can almost hear the clamor of keyboards as the life members of the Legion of Accuracy rev up to blast me for suggesting that the Web is a reliable information resource. Okay. If you get second-hand information from personal sites of individuals with no credentials, well, you could be in troubleââ¬âand you deserve the trouble you get. For facts, I go to the sites of trusted news sources, technology organizations, educational institutions, government outlets, and international agencies. I also go to popular culture sites for references, some for serious uses, some to incorporate in the occasional witticism (oh, come on, sometimes I'm witty).
The reality is that over the next few years, many hard information sources are going to lock their doors and start handing out keys only to those willing to pay. The complexion of the Web will change in ways we cannot imagine. The Web of 2013 and beyond will be a barred well of information accessible only to those who throw in silver and gold. This is a fact. There's no way to change it, so maybe we need to rediscover how we used to do research. Library card, anyone?
Locking Up the Web
By Lance Ulanoff
Recently, the Web sites of People magazine and Entertainment Weekly moved their content behind pay gates. Only magazine subscribers, AOL members, and newsstand buyers (whose use is limited) can view the magazines' content online. This is not surprising news. The trend began a few years ago when the Wall Street Journal Web site shut the gate. It has been repeated by online-only ventures like Salon.com and by the Web arms of print publications large and small. The New York Times on the Web and Newsday.com, for instance, charge for archival content.
In these tough economic times, publications have little choice but to look for new sources of revenue, and I expect many moreââ¬âeven online-only propertiesââ¬âto make similar moves in the coming months and years. That there will be a transition from free to paid content is so obvious, it's almost not worth talking about. What is worth examining, though, is the impact the change will have, over time, on the makeup of the World Wide Web. Bit by bit what was free, now is not; what was readily available, now is viewable only if you pay. What will this mean for those of us who regularly use the Web to do research?
The move from free to fee is not limited to institutional information sources. Formerly free sites that allow people to become members and contribute information, to join discussion forums, or even to build their own simple sites have switched to fee-based systems. As a result, fewer people use these sites, slowing the growth of information on the Web. While these sites might not be where you would go to do hard research, the reduced number of contributors does make the job of finding anecdotal examples or doing a quick, unscientific opinion survey a little harder.
How different will tomorrow's Web be? Let's fast forward to the year 2013, and imagine performing a search. The Web still has hundreds of thousands of free personal sites, but most of the solid, factual, trustworthy information lies behind gates. Search engines may or may not have icons that distinguish pay content from free; my hope is that they will. Even for pay content, you'll still be able to follow links, but you won't be able to see anything beyond an abstract without paying.
Over the last decade or so, the Web has given writers, including this one, a powerful tool for quickly and efficiently researching an incredibly broad range of topics and obtaining reliable information (assuming one uses multiple sources and applies some skepticism). The coming change will force me and others to rethink the way we use the Web for research. Will we have to decide at every site whether to pay, say, $1 per article or, to access unlimited articles, a $4.95 monthly fee? This has the potential to become incredibly expensive, not to mention tedious. I'm hoping that by 2013 there will be large content warehouses that let you pay monthly or yearly fees to access content from many different sites (kind of like LexisNexis but for the broader range of content you find on the Web). This would be much more efficient and cheaper than paying per article or per site.
If such services don't appear, we may see a flood of authors, researchers, and scholars heading back to the library. We all still use libraries, of course, but thanks to the Web, many of us no longer have to schedule long sessions to do piles of research for one or two projects at a time. There are countless documents not stored on the Web, but for new developments, near history, and classic texts (the works of Shakespeare, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, many reference books, and so forth), the Web has become the best source of information.
Tyreman: ...if you control the media you control the people and the country...
J_dupak: In the days of corporate scandals and overpaid CEO's its difficult to have pity for corporations...
jdneal: I myself find the free content I'm getting right now useless.
At this point I can almost hear the clamor of keyboards as the life members of the Legion of Accuracy rev up to blast me for suggesting that the Web is a reliable information resource. Okay. If you get second-hand information from personal sites of individuals with no credentials, well, you could be in troubleââ¬âand you deserve the trouble you get. For facts, I go to the sites of trusted news sources, technology organizations, educational institutions, government outlets, and international agencies. I also go to popular culture sites for references, some for serious uses, some to incorporate in the occasional witticism (oh, come on, sometimes I'm witty).
The reality is that over the next few years, many hard information sources are going to lock their doors and start handing out keys only to those willing to pay. The complexion of the Web will change in ways we cannot imagine. The Web of 2013 and beyond will be a barred well of information accessible only to those who throw in silver and gold. This is a fact. There's no way to change it, so maybe we need to rediscover how we used to do research. Library card, anyone?
