Dave McClure asserts that “Subscriptions are the new black” and that by 2015 everybody will be at it. Subscriptions a way of raising revenue is definitely the in thing at the moment. Rupert Murdoch is threatening to cut off google from the News Corp pages and make everyone pay for access to its flagship titles such as The Wall Street Journal.
I agree with Dave to some extent. Newspapers such as The Guardian and The Economist have been charging people to access content for some time. Most organisations that produce content will move to the subscription model at some point in the future. The best part of this is that it will sort the men from the boys. The ones that produce interesting, compelling, content, will be the ones that succeed. It may also mean that news organisations will go back to producing opinion and news worthy copy rather than glossy bubblegum fluff and gossip.
Smaller organisations have known for some time that subscriptions are the way to make money when you have comelling content. A short look at Internet Business Mastery will see a whole swag of small organisations that use the subscription model to make money. You could probably argue that the large organisations dug their own graves by offering so much free content to start with.
