Geschichtsstunde: Zeitungen verlangen seit 180 Jahren kein Geld für ihre Inhalte

Das ist gut zusammengefasst:

Since then, for about 180 years, the retail price of a newspaper has never reflected the total cost of assembling and producing it. Any paper that tried to charge such a price (6x more) would lose circulation and be undercut by correctly priced competing papers.

As news now moves online, the same rule of economics apply: The price of a product in a competitive market falls to the marginal cost of creating and delivering one more unit.

For printed newspapers, the marginal cost was a little more paper and ink, maybe an extra block on the delivery route. Subscription fees never accounted for the fixed costs of producing the content: the building, staff, printing press, etc. That share of costs has long been paid by advertising and diluted by economies of scale.

The same economic forces apply online. And because the marginal cost of bits is nearly zero, the appropriate price becomes too small to bother tracking. Free is the result.

In fact, the principle of marginal-cost pricing is even stronger in the Internet economy because there are very low barriers to entry and nowhere near the startup costs of print. And the marginal costs such as bandwidth and storage decline every month.

Those who ignore the rule of marginal-cost pricing and try to charge users for content in a competitive market will be undercut by more efficient competitors who stick with free. They’ll also face an endless fight against piracy, because economics says the product should be free and technology makes it easy to duplicate and spread.

Theorie, Praxis und darauf aufbauende Online-Strategie treffen mehr oder weniger bekanntlich auch auf Musik und andere digitale Inhalte zu.

Lesenswerter Artikel: Newspapers: 180 years of not charging for content

via Techdirt