Apparently I missed the conversion from offering folks advice to charging people for advice on older articles that have appeared in past issues.
I assume that trend will continue for many other web sites offering "free advice".
Taunton and BHG(Wood magazine) appear to both charge for articles that were "free".
I realize that everybody needs to make a buck but I think a better approach would have been to leave the existing articles free and offer another page with "chargeable articles".
FWIW Pat, I agree completely -BUT, as you said, everybody needs to make a buck.
Vic
did you communicate your thoughts to the staff at FWW? We can't help you remedy your concerns here, Pat.
DAve
Pat Barber wrote:
Remember when we had to buy article reprints, because there wasn't a WWW?
Somewhere along the line people starting assuming that information on the web should be free.
You can sell ad space, can charge for access, or a little of both, as a for-profit business, someone has to cover costs.
Did you think that perhaps he was just mildly ranting here and informing others of their new policy?
Sure it was a "rant". If he REALLY is hoping for a change, we aren't the proper audience; FWW staff is. :)
Dave
BobS wrote:
It was a fairly mild rant and the purpose was to inform rather than change policy. I have bought their articles in the past and will probably continue to do so.
David wrote:
There is an incredible amount of free information on the WWW as it should be. Commercial enterprises though, have no obligation to give away information that they are in the business of selling. Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated don't give it away.
Looking to move to a new city? There are all sorts of information on the town of your desires and that is a good thing. Most appliance manufacturers make information available for installation, owner's manuals, comparisons of models. You can view the new car in your choice of colors.
Unless, like the print magazine, it is advertising supported, I don't see where any commercial enterprise has an obligation to give stuff away. Just my opinion. Ed
Having been in the "business" of computers for a little over 30 years I understand those costs more than you can imagine.
The "web" as a viable commercial market remains a mystery for most who are trying. While many companies are having great success with retail sites, others are not.
B a r r y wrote:
I would disagree - who would you consider is a better audience than us? Get all us wood-dorkers all riled up, point 'em in the right direction and before ya know it, FWW is caving in......
Won't happen but hey, it's the thought that counts....
Bob S.
I'm not "riled up" about it. If I have a beef with a company that needs addressing, I pick up the phone and discuss my concerns with the proper individual. If all I have is a general "bitch" like we all have about HD, then I might "rant" about the problem here, because there's no percentage in expecting HD to listen to the same old complaints that they've heard for years from numerous customers. I'm not sure that all public complainants really WANT the offending company to change it's ways. If they did, wouldn't they call the company and discuss it calmly and intelligently? Works for me! I'm not much for lynch mob mentality, either... :)
Dave
BobS wrote:
You left out that the people who produce the information like to get paid for it as well. Welcome to the "entitlement generation" who think everything of value should be free (to them) and that some nebulous entity (the corporate "they") should pay for it.
Information costs money. Full Stop.
-- "We need to make a sacrifice to the gods, find me a young virgin... oh, and bring something to kill"
Tim Douglass
Pat Barber wrote in news:GZdwe.1042634 $ snipped-for-privacy@bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net:
Two thoughts:
I paid for the original publications, saved most of them, and tossed or took to the wood club the ones I thought excess to my needs. But they were not free.
My local library has back issues of most of the Taunton magazines. I can use them at no charge, but I must go to the library, and retrieve them from the archives. The library is supported with our tax dollars, but is not free.
And a bonus thought: Taunton evidently believes that there is value beyond that which they can extract from advertisers on their site. This experiment will yield its results in due time. I have no predictions.
However, few other 'pay sites' on the Internet have proved economically viable, with the exception of adult content. Possible exception is the Wall Street Journal...
Vote with your dollars.
Patriarch
I kind of like Discover magazine's setup- subscribers to the magazine can enter the information from their mailing label, and that entitles you to access all the articles on the site. Might work for FWW, might not, but it works for me- and it's an incentive to get the subscription rather than nabbing things peicemeal.
- Consumer Reports Online
- Pay per use online automotive manufacturer's service info sites, like techinfo.toyota.com and Subaru's version of the same, are huge success stories! They take the place of multi-hundred dollar manuals.
- Financial research sites, like Morningstar
- Newspaper sites that allow access to articles from yesterday's paper and earlier
- Dating services
- Alldata
I can go on, and on....
FWW's online content is typically good enough that it may very well be viable.
Barry
The problem isn't that they charge to download these little tidbits, it is how much they charge. $3.50 for one article? Where did they get that number?
How does any business come up with a price for what they sell? Some combination of cost analysis, market research, and sheer guesswork.
For downloading a PDF of an article, the incremental costs are essentially zero. You charge what you think the market will bear and adjust up or down as experience dictates.
Well, if you ask me, that price has nowhere to go but down. They must not want to make any sales. When a year of subscription costs $35, $3.50 per article is an insult to my intelligence.
I might guess that the articles are aimed at people who aren't likely to subscribe, but would like access to a small number of articles. The buyer doesn't have to purchase a copy at the newsstand (USD7.99) and FWW gets $3.50, most of which goes right to the bottom line.
todd
We can mostly blame the people on eBay that harvest this free information and burn it to a CD or copy it to an eBook that they offer for sale, charging for the information is one way to stop these leeches. More and more sites with free plans are now charging to download them for this very reason. My site has been copied verbatim so many times that I have just decided to ignore it, eBay gives lip service to the problem, but that is about all they do. I have an example on my site where boat plans are sold, what the customer gets is a photocopied sheet of paper with the instructions to go to my free plan site.
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