Should information online be free, or should publishers try to squeeze out money from consumers?
Battelle: The model of publishing is not very different online or off: one way or another, the publisher needs to be paid for the service and information they provide. Advertising, search, or paid, it depends on what the content and context are — but someone has gotta pay. Gwertzman: I have gone back and forth on this. When we started nytimes.com in 1995-96, our intention was to charge subscribers, and in fact from mid-1996 until the summer of 1998, nytimes.com charged overseas subscribers $35 a month, and we averaged about 5,000 customers. But we dropped the fee when we realized that unless our competitors — like the washingtonpost.com — charged, we would not reach the mass of readers we wanted. But I have come to change my mind, and I believe that now the Times and other publications with large subscriber bases should charge a fee, even if that means the number of viewers may drop. Otherwise there is no way to earn enough income to expand the online newspapers into solid news publ
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