Got a mail from Lars Larson. Was some commentary on McCain. Just for grins, I thought I would go to his forum / message board / whatever and check out what people here are saying.

It's a pay deal.

After doing some digging, I see a lot of the GOP blow hards do this. Lars is doing this, and for the purposes of this thread, I'm not labeling him a blow hard.

That's not the point.

The point is, shouldn't a defensible statement of support, or ideology survive public commentary? Thom Hartman has an open forum, as do many others, yet we see these closed premium ones popping up, mostly on the GOP / Corporate side of things.

The first thing that occurs to me is those dollars are actually serving a few purposes:

1. Demonstrate commitment. Having drunk the kool-aid, the paying participant is now a member of the "in" club, despite the actions of said club possibly being in their best interests.

2. Messaging channel paid for by those so targeted. Again, with said messaging maybe not good for them, but they want it bad enough to pay for it. Interesting...

3. Truth management. If one channel is louder than another, it has an advantage in that it can shout down other competing ones and leverage mind-share. Also, this tends to make it difficult to quote, and question as the norms for the paid "bubble" group are very well aligned.

4. Increased value perception for the personality doing this. I think this works out, right or wrong, well aligned or not. Being able to say, I've got a list of X paying members, means being able to demonstrate power. Nice.

5. Marginalize the two way / many to many nature of the Internet. The resulting environment is kind of a multi-media broadcast centric one. It's clearly a one to many deal, with only supporting voices generally tolerated.


Not too fond of these things. If it's solid, it should be viable outside the bubble. There are other ways to do the Premium bit. Publish books, early release broadcasts / podcasts / chat sessions, ability to plug your own relevant deal / cause.

Not to speculate specifically on the reasoning behind his forum, but could the "premium" concept simply be another revenue source to cover a shrinking budget? I have noticed a few newspapers doing this with their archival material. I figured it must be getting more difficult to sell advertising. After all, in this economy, being "exclusive" can also mean that you can no longer afford to provide something of quality to everyone.

That's the answer generally given. In fact, the last conversation I watched, along these lines, was basically, "I can't continue to subsidize the website".

That's all fair and good. Ads are tough, and gonna get tougher, IMHO.

My point specifically, is the lack of a public feedback system. Generating revenue is a good thing and putting things behind doors is one way to do that.

Not really my beef though.

Maybe I can say it this way. When something really stupid gets said, there's really no accountability for it. The closed forum isn't gonna make any noise, the callers are screened and managed, etc...

...or I'm just blowing smoke.

I've run into paid-only newspaper archives since 1998.

I've thought about it two ways:
1. A way of paying for the archival space/servers/etc., the same way taxes pay for the public library.
2. The print edition of whatever article was paid for originally from not only the people buying the paper (either newsstand price or subscription), but also the advertisers in the print edition. Since the advertisements in the print edition aren't valid now, I bet none of them will influence how someone makes purchasing decisions in a manner the advertiser is interested in doing so.

I should mention that I've never actually paid to get content on a website - I find another way of getting the information. We have a choice - some people choose to pay, others don't, and there's no guarantee that either type of website will survive in the long run.