Granted, the title of this post isn’t well thought out. I’m sure that’s why I’m blogging and not publishing a novel. I did want to briefly touch on a coming debate that could impact us in education. An eSchoolNews article today mentions the topic. It’s probably in the current news based on comments made at the World Media Summit. Comments from the summit by Rupert Murdoch center around the need for ‘traditional’ news sources to charge internet search engines and other web sites for news reports.
There’s some validity to the point. I regularly read news stories from any number of popular search engine sites. I can’t say with 100% certainty that they are paying for that content. I haven’t been paying specifically to read those stories. However, a reporter somewhere is being paid to write much of what we consume as ‘news’. We’ve read about it as newspapers struggle to maintain subscribers, as network news programs struggle to maintain viewers. Our methods of news consumption have changed. The medium for delivery has changed. At this point, though, many of the sources of the news have not.
How does this affect K-12? As the eSchoolNews article points out, it might leave students scrambling to access certain resources (assuming that some resources go out of business or price themselves beyond some of their customer base). The debate goes beyond newspaper sites. Tech-savvy users tend to gravitate toward free, easy-to-use products with great features. YouTube is a great example and is used by many K-12 teachers. One of the biggest questions asked since Google’s purchase of YouTube (and asked here) revolves around the eventual need to generate revenue.
The same could be said for popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter. How do these sites make money? I’m not sure they do as of yet. “Advertising” is always the most common answer, but there are no ads on Twitter and only limited ads on Facebook. However, both companies have had sizeable investors. Why? Because people are gathering and communicating and this is where they’re gathering. Become a part of it, we’re told.
Just as newspapers are dipping their toe in the water of fee-based content (in an effort to survive), I think we’ll see companies like this do the same. The ad revenue won’t be there forever and these free services still require a hefty infrastructure and personnel to maintain and update.
I think the business model will be similar to the highly-profitable text messages we all send. Perhaps it will be similar to another very profitable model, iTunes. Eventually, I think we’ll be asking ourselves whether it’s worth a penny per tweet to use Twitter or worth some minimal fee to ‘subscribe’ to Facebook and keep up with others.
Can it all really be free forever?