An Open and Closed Case: Open Content vs. Closing Content
Magazine publishers have come back nearly full circle on their Web presences. One of our team members forwarded me an email on a story posted in Business Week's Web site today. Funny thing was, it was only a link, and the story required registration access. Fine, so I registered. Once through this process, the web site then announced that I needed to be a magazine subscriber to view the article. I'm all for supporting premium content, but this one made no sense to me whatsoever. What value was in this email except to promote subscriptions to Business Week? I didn't even get an option to purchase the single story with an upgrade, or a free trial, or any other reasonable online incentive. I am sure that the person sending me this email did not expect to be the unwitting transmitter of a sales pitch message: no doubt he thought that he was building a relationship through forwarded content. By contrast, BetterHumans points out that Wikipedia, a collaboratively developed multilingual, collaboratively developed encyclopedia now has more than 160,000 English-language articles contributed for free distribution, one of numerous Open Content initiatives under way. Between these two radical extremes lies the future for most professional publishers, in a world where people acknowledge the value of building a wide range of relationships through content and sensible and progressive ways to recoup the market value of content when it serves both the supplier and the consumer. Asking people to establish a relationship that they don't want or need to get a relationship that they DO want and need is not a formula for long-term content marketing success.