Whither Paying For Content

I happened to read a piece, not prominently displayed today, on NYTimes.com that announces that its “Times Select” plan will be discontinued as of midnight tonight. Times Select was the paper’s “premium” content offering for the last year or so. Most of its columnists and its archives weren’t available unless you paid. If you were a print subscriber, it was free. Otherwise the cost was something along the lines of fifty bucks a year.

No more, you can read the op-ed pieces to your liberal hearts’ content. Better, you can do a search in the archives back to 1987, I think it is. Before that, they are still going to charge you.

The article noted that the only paper that still charges for content, and apparently makes money doing it, is the Wall Street Journal. It notes that Salon tried it, as did the Los Angeles Times and others.

I started out watching broadcast TV and listening to local radio. ABC, CBS, NBC, the local PBS after awhile. and the random independent station or two on the high channels, what were they called? UHF. We had a bonus in Detroit back then because CKLW, the Windsor, Ontario station, Channel Nine, made its way to our antenna. Antenna!

Back then people actually watched commercials! I’m not kidding you children. The show started, at a point, it stopped and commercials came on. We watched them! Same thing with newspapers and magazines. People flipped through the pages, stopping, I swear this is true, at the ads; or, at least enough people did to pay the bills so that the TV, radio and newspapers kept coming.

Has the internet and the new media changed this? Well, maybe but but not quite yet in a fundamental way. Advertisers have just figured out how to stick their stuff in your face in the new mediums. So far, they seem to think it works as they are paying for it. They did popovers, unders and arounds.

Content inclusive advertising is increasing. You already have seen it over the past decades. M&M’s messed up, to the delight of Reese’s Pieces in ET. Back to the Future, parts however many, with their ad placements. TV does it with the reality shows and the home improvement shows. When you make the mistake of hovering your cursor over an ad hyperlink, you get a pop up ad. MTV I’m told has a web program that lets you click on one of the actor’s pieces of clothing and go to a site to buy it.

Does it work? I gather it does, as people are paying the content providers to include it. Me? I get annoyed when I first see it and then consciously and subconsciously develop strategies to avoid it reaching my consciousness.

To end on an ad friendly note, I saw an ESPN ad recently on a TV at the neighborhood bar. There, there is no sound on the TVs, just pictures. The ad was for SportsCenter. It does a lot of weird, sometimes funny, advertising for itself. The spot showed a SC guy in a suit and a NASCAR guy in his racing suit, whomever drives the 2 car. They were talking and pointing at the car, it turns out, about the decals that covered the body. I know that because at the end, the NASCAR guy stuck a two inch by one inch decal on the right front, very low, fender that said “SC.” The ESPN guy did not seem happy with either/or both the product placement or the price.

Won’t make me watch NASCAR or ESPN any more than I do, but, I thought it was funny.