The idea for this post came with the following idea. What is paid content and what is paid service? Would you know the difference?
So, if a news site charges for an amount of time, for an amount of activities or clicks, and not exclusively for mere access to a news site, are we still talking about paid content then? Or will this become paid service?
OK, CoTweet gave the kick off for this post. Although I am still using Twitter, I have thought about CoTweet for a while as it is a good Twitter CRM tool and offers more opportunity to handle multiple accounts with multiple people. Yesterday, the company announced to launch an enterprise edition as a paid service version - probably in order to monetize their business model. The new enterprise program plans to start with $1,500 per month.
Among the first booking clients that will use the fee-based service are top companies like Ford and McDonalds. They profit from the new paid service offer in terms of benefits for data storage, usability and analytic features versus pure conversational options. And CoTweet makes way -and becomes another test- for Twitter to launch their commercial accounts soon.
Now, I don't want to discuss whether it makes sense to start the paid service era. As in my eyes the need for paid service offers is definitely evident if content will still be valued the way it deserves to be valued. Content production costs time, resources and fees for service partners. It costs money. And somebody has got to pay the bill...
No wonder, Murdoch openly discussed the idea of removing the News Corp sites from Google's index in the following interview. He wants to make money with 'his' content.
And as a consequence Hulu, a joint venture of Murdoch's News Corp. and NBC Universal, just recently thought about the launch of a paid service subscription offer.
Spot On!
In my eyes, the future of content monetization will be some kind of fee-based subscription model for those web businesses that want to survive. The question remains: Which model will the users finally accept? Paid content or paid service? But it is not as easy as you might think. As paid content could become paid service in the future - no matter if indexed on Google, or not- are we not talking about a new word for the same idea: Getting money for content value.
Curious about your views...
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