When asked about the new paywall that the New York Times is erecting around its website, Barry Diller, longtime media mogul and studio head turned internet entrepreneur, gave us his everlasting wisdom on the matter of paid online content.
His wisdom: paywalls will fail at first, but will eventually succeed.
In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Diller, who is the Chairman and CEO of IAC (the owner of Ask.com among other sites) said that free content will end because "people are used to paying for applications".
Although I'm not entirely sure how he made that correlation between content and applications, and how the two relate in terms of people paying for digital products, he may very well have a point.
"Everyone said, no one will pay for music. It took seven or eight years for the iTunes concept...and now it's a multibillion business," he said. "People are paying for music, they could get it free, but they're paying for it....these are industries so to speak that are going to push to say our content is, we think it's valuable at this. Steve Jobs did this in music. He said music is for 99 cents and he changed everything. Because he said I'm going to price it so low, that everyone is going to adopt it. So the same will happen."
