Indian newspapers have still not gone down the ‘free’ path and Arun Poorie, the Founder, MD of India Today (a group that publishes in 13 indian languages and also has publishing and distribution rights for several international brands) has said recently that the free-on-web model hurts their business model and makes no sense at all! one might think ‘of course the publishers are going to say so..’ but as content creators we’ve seen that providing content for free is not a business model by any stretch of imagination. We have hosted short form content on youtube for eons on and havent made a penny (at least directly) from the content, the same material is distributed by the telcos and makes a tiny sum of money every month in royalties.

I feel that consumers will pay for content (delivered digitally) that’s bundled well, available on the go (think mobile) and MUCH cheaper than its traditional counterpart. This is something that requires the industry to act in concert and that’s what they’ve been dragging their feet over

The music business has already sunk its own ship by playing the stone age man game. there still is no other platform selling ‘units’ and accepting micropayments apart from itunes! Some of us would happily pay for tracks to save the trouble of searching, downloading and listening to poor quality mp3s. of course we’d like to pay less than what a CD costs, have the liberty to do what we want with the song after we’ve bought it and so on..

free is not a business but nor is ‘only me’ a strategy in this economy and digital age