Something I’ve been churning around lately is the whole concept of paid content on the web. Don’t worry, I’m not talking about this site…
But I mean, in general, all over the web. Does anyone really pay for content? Yes, clearly some do, as examples of this proliferate the internet. Newspapers, academic journals, magazines, and just content heavy sites, many of them have adopted paid-content models.
Myself, there is only one site I’ve ever been willing to pay to access, and that’s O’Reilly’s Safari website. That’s a great resource. You can click the link for a more detailed description of it’s business model, but in a nutshell you can pay to get full access to the text of thousands of technical books (virtually the whole O’Reilly catalog, and a half-dozen other publishers as well). Well, IMHO this works mainly because any one of those books costs between $30-$60 USD, and the monthly subscription for 10 books at a time is less than the lower of that bound. Not a bad deal.
So, does anyone reading this pay for content anywhere on the internet?
