Connecting the Dots

Sun honcho Jonathan Schwartz condemns the practice of charging for online media as outdated:

Last week, I did a panel with Charlie Rose, which like the article I just wrote for Harvard Business Review, will not be available on the web without a payment. How 20th Century. How Web 1.0.

The implication is that the 21st century, Web 2.0 approach would be to offer said article free of charge while plastering it with ads. Well, I simply don’t believe that the entire publishing industry can be financed by advertising, nor do I think this is desirable. The fact that Harvard Business Review offers pay-per-download is actually quite rare and progressive (though the practice is spreading), a prescient provision for the day when offline publications will no longer be capable of subsidizing their online counterparts. Rags that force me to subscribe just to read a single article are the anachronisms. That said, the $6 price tag is outrageous for a two page article. Considering that an entire back issue goes for $17, I couldn’t see paying more than $2-3 and even that seems a bit rich.

While I’m at it, I totally agree with Jonathan that “the dot in dot com” was a fantastic marketing campaign. But the dot in Web 2.0? Am I pronouncing it wrong? Shouldn’t that be the point in Web 2.0? That way, it even has a nice double meaning. Come to think of it, maybe we should market AllPeers as the “oh!” in Web 2.0.

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