About ten months ago, I wrote about how Lily Allen was wrong, and how those disagreeing with her were wrong too. The subject was the survival of the music industry, how it had got itself into such a mess, and how it might extricate itself from that situation.

One of the major circulation newspapers in the UK is about to be put behind a paywall, to much furore amongst a certain group of people. Caitlin Moran wrote an opinion piece about how she was in favour of the move (registration/payment may be required, oh the irony!), but whilst I think she makes some good points, I think there is one area that she doesn't address entirely, and that's the paywall itself.

Historically, newspapers have given away a lot of their content for free online. I remember the early days of the web, when newspapers had little to no web presence, and I never imagined that one would be able to read the whole newspaper for free via the world wide web. In the heady days of the mid-late 90s, the internet, and specifically the web, was an exciting new frontier for both people and businesses. As we saw with the dot-com boom and bust in the stock markets in the early 21st Century, there was a lot of investment, and very little strategic thinking.

Newspapers ummed and ahhed about how much of their content should be made available, and whether it should be free, but competition led them to a position where almost everything they published was given away for free. Undoubtedly, the fact that this was technically possible was of great interest to organisations that previously only had once-daily access to their audience. Newspapers became instantly more aligned with television and radio, able to cover breaking news, and change their coverage in reaction to events.

Invigorating and exciting as this may have been, the papers were setting themselves up for a fall. The music industry failed to react to illegal content, choosing not to make easily downloadable content available to consumers. This conditioned a generation that downloading music for free was normal, to the extent that it isn't even really a social faux pas, let alone a legal one. Newspapers, by giving their content away for free, devalued their product in the same way.

There is a whiff of gunpowder, and a bleeding foot in all of this. Unlike the music and movie industries, there was no illegal activity undermining their sales, no scanning and republishing of their content. They walked into this situation of their own accord, which they are no doubt regretting as an industry. Of course, there's no guarantee that it would happen any differently even if they had their time again. However, what's done is done.

The problem I have with paywalls isn't the concept of paying, but rather that it seems to be an attempt to put the genie back into the bottle. In every media industry that has had its business model impacted by online sharing, there has been a distinct failure to change attitudes. Hectoring and harrassing lawyers' letters haven't diminished the number of people downloading music or movies, and as I outlined previously, I believe it is better to appeal to people's inherent laziness than to their sense of fairness, particularly when that fairness is expected by large corporations. If the real victims are abstracted by a company, we can easily forget those who are really affected.

The price of these paywalls will, I believe, doom them to failure. I am not so interested in the content of The Times as whole that I am prepared to consult them for all my online news, as I would surely want to, given the price I'm expected to pay. The ability to read stories and angles in different papers is part of what makes the "news experience" so compelling online. That's not to say that I wouldn't pay for content. For example, I'd happily pay, on a per issue basis, for a downloadable copy of a newspaper to read on my phone/e-reader/mobile device, one that didn't need connectivity for me to be able to read the content. Price point is key, but that's a definite market there.

Paying for content on the conventional web is a tougher nut to crack. A paywall in the conventional monthly/weekly subscription-sense is probably doomed to failure. There are just too many other options for news to make paying for them worthwhile. A per-article micropayment model is undoubtedly more appealing, particularly one that was adopted across several news organisations. Possibly a low monthly subscription (of the order of £1) that included a number of articles "for free", and then a monthly bill based on the number of articles read above that quota. The money would then be distributed to the content providers, and would generally encourage competition amongst the newspapers to provide compelling content. Free articles, charging for a group of articles as one (a "supplement" if you will) and other promotional tools would all be available to publishers.

Pie-in-the-sky? Maybe, but a drastic move like this is likely to be the only way that news organisations can "monetize the web" (ugh!).

People will pay, but only if it's easy, and only if the price is right.