A project that started three years ago with the purpose of scanning and digitizing old newspapers was just stopped by Google. Why is the number one Internet search engine not expanding this archive?, don't cut our access to history!
The company that so far had 3.5 million articles of old newspapers gone digital stops expanding its library of news. Challenging the Long Tail due to publisher pressures. During my research about the subject, I ran into an article from 2005, "Pay or free? Newspaper archives not ready for open Web... yet", in this article, NY Times CEO stated basically how stupid it would be for them to give away something that the market place is paying a huge premium for. But as time passed they succumbed to the new booming online advertisement revenues and the online pressures. Does it make sense to back off again now?
The next image found in an article from the Newspaper Association of America, shows in a very didactic way why the online news revenues will never reach the ones made in the traditional era. It claims that the users have lost their engagement to newspapers and now spend a considerable lower amount of time with a newspaper.
The reality is that publishers could make more money by only the small group or people that will have the access to these physical archives, than what they would make offering them to the world online - again the internet pennies philosophy. Shamefully we have to say that this decision might actually make people don't read them at all. In these times for many people, what is not online doesn't even exist, so the publishers will not be letting all the world read this archives by cutting its universal access.
In my opinion, publishers are not going to last too long with these initiatives of trying to keep the traditional revenue stream only. A solution for them is as stated before, leverage on "Experience" which is what the customer is looking for nowadays. So why not find a solution?, Harvard Business Review does it well, why not offering an abstract of the articles for free and then full access to the information for a fee?, I understand it wouldn't work for highly demanded content but, for archives that have expired for years and that will most probably be searched or needed by specific groups of people, I don't see threats from piracy in this case. And the content would be available worldwide. A mixed revenue stream is better than a single one, so why not offer offline in their archives, online for a fee, plus ads revenues?
See Article:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-google-digitizing-newspapers.html
Also see:
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050201/
http://blog.scoutanalytics.com/attention-economics/why-online-news-revenue-will-never-equal-newspaper-revenue/
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