Jun 04 2008
Dear G&M: no, the locks are NOT off
A move back to my hometown of Parry Sound and an accounting glitch with my web host have put me behind in my blogging, so this post is coming out a little after the fact, but I couldn’t resist commenting on the Globe and Mail’s assertion that “the locks are off” of formerly paid content on their website.
No they’re not.
Do a search on the Globe’s website for just about anything. Narrow the search parameters using their search tool to dates within, say, this past February. Almost everything that comes up still has locks on it. Who are they trying to kid?
This seems ass-backwards to me. What is valuable about news is its newness. If they want to keep a paywall on something, why not make it today’s news, or yesterdays news, after which they open up the archives to search engines and let bloggers (and others) link freely to them? And reap all that extra long-tail traffic?
Who is going to pay for old stories? I don’t understand this logic. And what blogger (or other news organization, or anybody) is going to want to link to Globe and Mail articles if they know those links won’t work after a couple of months?
Mathew Ingram thinks the reason his employer has done this is the same as the reason the New York Times took their pay wall down: to move to an advertising model rather than a subscription model for the archives. But Mathew, the G&M didn’t take the pay wall off its archives, it took it off some of the columnists (and games) that were previously for-pay. Completely different animal. I don’t know what the Globe’s reasons were for this move, but it sure doesn’t look like a move to join “the Internet era”. It still looks like these guys don’t get the web at all.
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