Dan Gillmor published a great piece about the futur of paying archives and the evolution of the business model for publishers. Should they open their archive for free and by this way be the center of their reader community (says Dan), generate revenues thanks to keyword-based advertising or should they keep the pay-per-view archive model ?
A very interesting debate generated by Dan on this issue and definitely a must read. In France, we are facing the same issue but we are certainly far behind in term of positioning the debate. Our dialy economic press, La Tribune, Les Echos, is offering different fees for accessing the archives per view or per month, different packages etc... but only La Tribune provides RSS feeds... Things are moving...
A quote from Dan's post:
If I was a publisher with a pay-per-view archive, here's what I'd do:
1) Re-publish every article in the archives with a unique URL, outside the pay-wall. It would be helpful if the articles published since the newspaper went online could have the same URLs, but don't worry if that's too expensive; if the stories are important enough, they'll be found and pointed to. It'll just take a little longer.
2) Leave every new article on the Web at the URL it had upon publication. That's easier.
3) Encourage the readers to use the archives, with house advertisements, website notices e-mail to local librarians and other ways to get out the word.
4) Let local bloggers know that you welcome their links, and that you've made the change in part because they need it, too.
5) If a local blogger points to your article, use Trackback or other such technology to point back. (But be careful of link spamming.)
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