Content wants to be free. Advertising wants to be accountable. It’s a tough time to be a new media child.

The story in Daily Finance reporting on Jonathan Miller’sspeculation that one day Hulu may charge for content has ricocheted around the news forums and digests. Boy, I’ll tell you, every time media companies take a step or two towards the invisible fence line surrounding the free content playground online the dog collar starts spitting electrodes. Posters to the column on Daily Finance were quick to jump on Miller’s comments:

“The fact that executives are still trying to figure out a way to charge for content online is mind boggling to me. It doesn’t work. Hulu was an ingenious idea. Since people were watching shows online for free anyways, why not create create an online platform and shift power back to the networks.”

“Another exec with no clue. I love Hulu in its current incarnation, and would certainly abandon it if it wasn’t free. What an idiot.”

Most of the 60+ posts were like that. The first poster (above) linked to a survey on a related topic at EngadgetHDthat asked, “How much would you pay for HULU on your TV?” When I took the survey the score was pay “Nothing”, 4,590 (76.6%), to pay “Something” (there were a few options), 1,401 (23.3%). I was among the “nothing” crowd.

Michael Kinsley’s article eight years ago in Slate, “It’s not just the Internet”, is still the best thing that’s ever been written on the subject of content economics. It should be required reading for media professionals. The truth is, content for a consumer audience is free, offline and on. If it’s not for free, it’s for darn near nothing. It’s underwater. It’s in the red. It costs the producer, not the consumer of the information.

So, of course, advertising has foot the bill for content for 30 years, maybe more, and grew weary of it at the start.  Despite their carrying costs advertisers got no input into the editorial products, little input into the position of their messages, and only some insight into how much of their investment reached its target - which was maybe half. Advertising has wanted a little money back, too.

The Internet, consequently, has grown-up in the midst of a stormy relationship and the impact on its personality has been profound. If ever there was a child that needed a little play time, it has been the Internet.

Listen to the shrill voices of it’s guardians: Be accountable. Don’t skulk. Answer me! Act responsively. You get nothing until the work is done. Why can’t you behave like a grown-up? What’s it worth to you? What’s the matter with you? Why are you crying? Here, try this. Try this. Try this! 

Michael Kinsley said in his 2001 article, “Information has been free all along. It’s the Internet that wants to enslave it.” Funny how that statement rings true as it pertains to the other partner in the relationship, the advertiser. Do you hear the echo? It resonates through the whole matter.

It’s a tough time to be a media child. You really have to wonder about the parents.

Saving newspapers: Less is more, part 2

More about how to save newspapers today in Jon Freidman’s Marketwatch column. Pundits Larry Kramer, Laura Rich Fine and Nathan Richardson, all credentialed new media-types, argue collectively that newspapers need to have the gumption to charge readers for their products. Historically, they have not had that gumption. This is true. But, what should they charge? Today it is a token. If it is to be financially relevant to the business it means the cost of a newspaper will skyrocket. And/or, the newspaper product will shrink to fit a cost that is perhaps only modestly more than what people pay now. I paid $2.00 for the Wall Street Journal yesterday in the Boston airport. The New York Times, delivered free to my hotel room do0r this morning, has a cover price of $1.50. It is four sections and 90 pages deep, which just has to be (ridicuously) expensive. What could we expect if these properties assigned a more realistic price to their daily products, one that covered all the costs of ink and paper and distribution, for instance? $4.00? $5.00? $10?

One thing that would drop as a result of a price increase is the free hotel distribution, which can add up to a substantial portion of a newspaper’s daily circulation. But the fear – and reality – has always been, of course, that raising newstand prices on newspapers would cause the circulation to crumble, which would starve the advertising side. Okay, but so what? Newspapers need to act very quickly to find their core audience – that constituency that will pay almost any price for the product. A pack of cigarettes today, I am informed, costs over $10. Plenty of people still smoke. It’s helps that cigarettes are addicting, but so are newspapers to some. A small, deeply dedicated audience is a marketers dream – or ought to be. If they want to charge more, newspapers need to retreat to within those dedicated audience boundaries and make a big deal to advertisers of the fact that people are willing to pay a lot for the privilege of receiving their newspaper.

Or not. Michael Kinsley, writing a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Post, talked about life after newspapers arguing that, sad as it may be, their time may have come and gone. Quoting Joseph Shumpeter he wrote, ”Capitalism is a ‘perennial gale of creative destruction.’ Industries come and go.” Newspapers, he suggests - not unreasonably - are in the “go” part of the cycle.

Yes, but there are vital lessons in the plight of newspapers for all media, including online. The conditions of newspapers, after all, have been wrought by the same media intelligentsia that has dominated online. Their thoughts and actions online have been driven by the sames thoughts and actions that drove newspapers (and magazines and television) for years: a desire for too much audience.

Which leads us back to comments made in this space earlier this week: less is more.

Content Becomes a Pauper

MediaPost’s “Around The Net” wrap-up alerts us to this lament by Douglas A. McIntyre at Time.com: “Content, Once King, becomes a Pauper.” The upshot is that the recession, but mostly the changing circumstances of digital media economy, have eroded the value of branded media content to such a low level that it may never recover. Even the accountants are piling on, insisting that major media companies write-down their content assets to reflect diminished value.

Yes, it’s true. The value of Time’s content and other mainstream media companies has been seriously diminished by the recession and the steady advance of the digital media economy. But it always strikes me how self-absorbed these expositors are, as if in the absence of value at Time Magazine, the value of content itself shall cease to exist.

In truth, content has always wanted to be free and has largely been free for some time now. Michael Kinsley, who thinks and writes about this issue as well as anyone, did so again this week in the New York Times where he observed that, “Newspaper readers have never paid for the content (words and photos). What they have paid for is the paper that content is printed on. A week of The Washington Post weighs about eight pounds and costs $1.81 for new subscribers, home-delivered. With newsprint (that’s the paper, not the ink) costing around $750 a metric ton, or 34 cents a pound, Post subscribers are getting almost a dollar’s worth of paper free every week — not to mention the ink, the delivery, etc.”

It is time to see the value of content differently, and not as Time or many newspaper publishers would want to. The economics of content don’t support the industrial media mills of yesterday – or, frankly, the online portals of today (see also: the history of Yahoo!). The value of content today is in its ability to proliferate and find success in small numbers where advertising can comfortably support the cost to sustain a profitable business.