Gameday "Premium"

MLB will try to charge us for thinking about the Twins.

“You replayed Casilla’s game-winning single in your head! That’ll be $1.50!”

I’ll just watch the videos after the game thank you

This reminds me of how the newspaper business his managed content online at times. I remember needing to subscribe to the NY Times. When they made that change, their traffic went down 90 percent. People went to CNN.com or a hundred other free outlets instead. They eventually discovered that content is meant to be free on the Web and opened it up again. Now they make way more money on Google Ads than they ever did on subscriptions.

A similar thing happened t ESPN.com: Only the die hard fans subscribed. The rest went to FOX Sports.com. It’s not as good, but it’s good enough.

MLB will try this; a majority of current GameDay users will go back to box scores, and they’ll find a precipitous drop off in traffic. Eventually, they’ll realize that they make more money through high traffic with Google ads than selling subscription services.

when “should” something be free?

If something didn’t exist two years ago, why does MLB owe it to you now at no cost?

to determine whether people wanted it and could they do it. Now that they have the answers they needed, MLB is making it just one more thing you can purchase to follow your team. I’m neutral on this, I’d be upset if I were a customer but I’m not. MLB lost me w/ gameday a few seasons go. I use another service on the rare day that I can’t watch the Twins on extra innings.

plus who needs it when we have the human gameday here on TT.

A lot of people here have stated the belief that things on the web are supposed to be, expected to be free. It won’t be this way forever.

The future of the newspaper industry (very soon just journalism, as the term newspaper will be fully obsolete and inaccurate) will be mostly on the web, but web advertising isn’t enough to sustain the industry. The Wall Street Journal, one of only two major US newspapers to not lose readership over the last year (with the USA Today) recently went to a partial premium setup on their website, where many articles are behind a payed subscription wall. We will be seeing this business model a lot soon, and consumers are just going to have to get used to the idea. People just say now “I’ll just go somewhere else and get it for free” but pretty soon, those places doing it for free will all be gone and out of business, it’s just not a sustainable model.

The Star Tribune is using the similar plan of making many stories print-only, but I’d be surprised if they don’t wise up and make those print only stories available for a web subscribers fee soon. We also might see a micro transactions business model in many places, where you can read short newslines for free, and you can read previews for the longer news stories, but the arts and variety sections and any longer articles will cost a few cents per article to view. You’d just sign in and it would bill to an account in a convenient fashion for everything you wanted to read. That would let people read and spend as little or as much as they want.

ESPN, oddly enough, probably has had the right idea for years. As annoying as their “insider” wall is when you ant to read an article, we’re going to see a lot more of that. They also are pioneering another field we’re going to see a lot more of: specialized local coverage in the style of a local outfit managed and presented by a larger media. Instead of reading The Small-Town-Gazette, we’ll probably see a lot more news sources like “The Big Town Paper’s Website, Southwest suburbs edition” or the like.