I was reading an article recently where an experienced web guy was describing rules to follow on the web. He might as well have called them unbreakable laws because the idea was that by not following these rules, you were destined for failure on the web. One in particular caught my attention, which was that you have to give your content away for free, arguing that otherwise someone else would do it, basically that as a paid-content provider you’d loose out to free content.
I’m not going to argue, I definitely like free content. For example, how a lot of news organizations make their publications free on the web, while people can still subscribe to their paid, print versions. Also, from personal experience, when I’m searching for something online, it’s for some quick information, i.e. a free, quality answer. But I’d say there’s more to it than that. Free and paid content both have their place on the web. It’s up to the individual dispersing that content to find a creative way to use it. Yes, putting time into showing people something you may want to make money from it and in that case advertisements would work, but drawing an example from print life, those free publications running solely on advertisements are definitely not beating out the paid ones, although there are quality ones on both sides. There’s also paid online content that Colleges pay big bucks for, anyone whose done research on one of those databases colleges subscribe to knows that I’m talking about.
Anyway, I’m just saying both can be successful and useful, saying you’ll fail with paid content on the web is a bit overboard 
Let me know what you think!
