this thread is inspired by this piece
http://tiny.cc/Gr82c and I know we have a lot of writers and journalists on the site so i thought it relevant to post it here, pls read it when you have time (
even if its not in 2010) and the comments especially.
what I want to ask is whether the people on AG who write for a living agree with the piece (a**uming you have read it)
extract from the piece:
"The internet is business-model neutral; it's like the postal service, or the telephone all it does is put suppliers in touch with consumers. The revolutionary new quality it adds is that it cuts out middlemen if a supplier can make their existence known to a consumer, there's no need for wholesaler warehouses, distributors, and a pavement-pounding sales force.
Enter Google.
(You knew I was going to say that name sooner or later, didn't you?)
Google's revenue stream is predicated on their success as an advertising company first and foremost. Remember DoubleClick? They're part of Google.
Google's business model is to monetize all internet content by slapping advertising on it and positioning themselves as the most convenient find-everything-at-your-fingertips gateway. The more high-quality content, the better; hence the drive towards free email, digitizing books, syndicating blogs via Google Reader, and so on. If all content is available over the internet via Google, then all content is monetizable. Content producers who expect to be paid by end-users for access to their content are inevitably going to come into conflict with Google, because this restricts the number of end-users who will see the content, and hence contribute to Google's revenue stream.
We all like free content. And we all like to be able to find things conveniently on the web. But I'm increasingly having a problem with the "information wants to be free" viewpoint because it ain't necessarily so, depending on how you define "information" and "free". Bandwidth is in the process of becoming so cheap it might as well be free, at least by the standards of the 1990s, let alone any earlier decade. Information is another matter, though. Not all information is created equal, and the cost of compiling and producing something new is disproportionately high. I write books for a living, and take roughly 6-12 months per book. If I can't earn a living at it if you wave a hypothetical magic wand and make all information free, thereby disintegrating the publishing, music, and commercial content industries overnight I'd probably not stop writing fiction but I'd have to do something else to earn a living, and therefore I'd have less time to write fiction, and consequently you'd have fewer of my stories to download."
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