As someone who has been getting the New York Times headlines by email everyday since 9/11, the announcement to get rid of their archaic pay-to-view Times Select service is great news. Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch thinks this will herald the end of an age when content wasn’t free (aka Web 1.0). The Wall Street Journal was recently acquired by News Corp, so speculation has been running high that the owners of MySpace will wise up to the new world order of the intertubes and kill their pay for content service too.
While this would be a good thing, it really won’t impact me all that much since I would only have read the occasional story locked behind the Times‘ barricade. I don’t read the WSJ at all (possibly because it’s pay-to-view), so that won’t affect me either. What I want to see lose their pay-to-view statuses are science magazines like Scientific American and New Scientist. These guys are still clutching onto this old model like a drowning man on a life preserver. As Duncan pointed out, you can still make money without imposing these draconian restrictions.
It’s also crummy when you google for some answer to a technical problem, and you get a link to a site that says you can read the rest of the answer if you register or pay or whatever. It’s so annoying that of course I’m going to just go back to my search and find an answer that I don’t have to register or pay to see. (Of course with science/medical journals you often can’t find that information somewhere else, but not so with technical answers!)