Printer Friendly Version

For decades, the way to keep the knowledge workers in your organization on top of industry news was to subscribe to the services of a content aggregator like Factiva, Dialog, or LexisNexis. The evolution of intranets and electronic delivery fit well with this approach, but now the amount of free content available to people with an Internet connection is changing the rules of the game.

The "deep Web" — online content that sits behind subscriptions and members-only barriers — and the not-so-deep Web (free Web content) collided with the launch of the Yahoo Subscriptions beta last month. The Yahoo service, which added LexisNexis and Factiva to its list of content aggregators and publishers this week, lets users search both the open Web and the deep Web in one search. And if you already have a subscription to Yahoo Subscription's publishing partners, you get to use the Yahoo search technology to search multiple publishers and aggregators as well as the open Web.

The approach isn't entirely new; Northern Light gave it a try until 2002. But it's an approach that Internet users should probably get used to. When International Data Group (IDG) CEO Pat Kenealy told Wired this week he thought the Internet of 2005 reminded him of television in 1955, when the content was all free, it was a comment that got your attention. Kenealy's company, after all, publishes some 300 Web sites and magazines in the technology space.

On Wall Street, newspaper stocks are performing poorly. The latest numbers from Dow Jones and The New York Times Co. were less than stellar, with the exception of their online ventures. The Wall Street Journal Web site had an 8.8 percent increase in the number of subscribers in the second quarter of this year; and remember, you pay for the Journal online.

Neither paid content or free content is going away anytime soon. The deep Web and the open Web will have to find a way to co-exist. That is, essentially, what the Yahoo Subscriptions beta is all about — finding a way to bring the paid and free content together for people searching the Internet. Is this what we should come to expect in the future?

John Blossom, president of Westport, Conn.-based Shore Communications, blogged about his experience taking the Yahoo Subscriptions beta for a test drive. Blossom found the service frustrating and confusing because it didn't provide a compelling reason for consumers to buy the content. It was hard to understand the relevancy of the search results because it was difficult to discern when some of the content was published. Some of the content found in the Yahoo Subscriptions search also appeared in the free Web search.

Despite the early growing pains, Blossom remains positive. "There is a strong future for subscription content on the Web," he told Intranet Journal. "Yahoo, Google, and others are eager to acquire premium content to round out their datasets."

One of the issues with trying to aggregate content from mutiple publishers, and in this case other aggregators, is that the content has no consistent format. There is no standard display of an abstract, author, or date.

"They don't, when you do a query on the (Yahoo) service, get a compelling search result," Blossom said.

There is also the issue of payment. Individual aggregators already made available systems to buy one piece of content. LexisNexis calls it LexisNexis A La Carte. But now that content is being exposed to a broad audience through Yahoo. Paying $3 for a piece of content isn't so compelling, especially when it might be available on the open Web.

Micropayments are one of those Web innovations we keep waiting for. We're still waiting for a viable system that makes spending small amounts online easier than the tried and true credit card method.

Blossom thinks the payment scheme will need to move toward bundling, where aggregators give users ten article for $9.99 for example, to make the payments more feasible. Or the aggregators could charge a fee for the service then add the micropayments for content. You pay a flat fee for cell phone use, and that's why you don't get a separate bill for the $0.79 in calls you make.

Yahoo Subscriptions is a beta program with a limited number of publishers and its share of growing pains ahead of it. It is certain to see its share of tweaks in the future. Blossom thinks the best strategy is to make a premium content aggregator available to the broadest set of publishers possible. "Premium content needs to rub shoulders with open Web content and prove its value," he said.

This is the strategy that is being used at The New York Times, where there is a combination of free and paid content online. Of course, that model means more access to basic content and features in the premium content that makes it worth the cost. People won't pay for distribution of content. And they won't pay for content when the value isn't clear.

"Publishers and aggregators need to do a better job of looking at their offerings and determining what is really valuable to an open Web audience and that would be worth paying for," Blossom said. "This will mean in many instances more money for more narrow and high-feature content products succeeding on the Web and less success for trying to charge for basic distribution of content that's best supported in an open Web model. And, hopefully, no more three-dollar press releases."