If you want information that is actionable and of interest to very few, you're going to pay a premium. But if you want information that many want to hear, you can spread the cost out and it can be individually cheap.
But it matters how people pay. The problem is that we've moved from paying for a subscription to implicitly on ad impressions per click. With a subscription, poor quality hurt the publisher because subscriptions got canceled. On per click models, it is basically a war for the best headline. And the quality of news is essentially irrelevant. By the time you realize that you've been fooled into clicking on useless blogspam again, they've booked the ad impressions.
You can't maintain quality on a per click revenue model. And you can't generate subscription revenue when people are not dissatisfied enough with the free blogspam. Nobody seems to have figured out good solutions to this yet.
I guess with intelligence there is also value if you get the information first, or are one of a small elect with the information -- scarcity has value. With public interest, it's often to your benefit if everyone gets the information -- the value goes up from network effects or something as more people know it.
If you want information that is actionable and of interest to very few, you're going to pay a premium. But if you want information that many want to hear, you can spread the cost out and it can be individually cheap.
But it matters how people pay. The problem is that we've moved from paying for a subscription to implicitly on ad impressions per click. With a subscription, poor quality hurt the publisher because subscriptions got canceled. On per click models, it is basically a war for the best headline. And the quality of news is essentially irrelevant. By the time you realize that you've been fooled into clicking on useless blogspam again, they've booked the ad impressions.
You can't maintain quality on a per click revenue model. And you can't generate subscription revenue when people are not dissatisfied enough with the free blogspam. Nobody seems to have figured out good solutions to this yet.