Tom Rachman Quotes

I'd like the reader to decide if he is willing to pay minute sums for content. I'd like the economics of web to be controlled between authors and readers, not advertiser.

In the summer of 2009, I modestly predicted that most major news organisations would be charging for content within 12 months. Charging, I argued, would not only plug the revenue gap; it would also help to re-establish value in their news product.

As much as I love scores of wonderful sites across the web, most of them are driven by the daily grind of the display/pageview hamster wheel. They create 20, 30, 40 'content snacks' a day, and I miss far more than I consume.

To me, the print business model is so simple, where readers pay a dollar for all the content within, and that supports the enterprise.

Newspapers are busily experimenting with different models. Traditionally, and I suspect in hindsight very mistakenly, online news was free. And once given free access readers felt it was their entitlement.

But the great thing, and the horrible thing about the web is you can just throw stuff up there and it doesn't cost anybody anything.

Open access is good, but we have to have ways and means where content that has been generated with a lot of effort and cost also gets the chance to monetise itself as is now beginning to happen in the West where some publications are really beginning to make their Internet revenue lines and subscription revenue lines quite significant.

If Youku had adopted YouTube's business model, we just would not be here. We would not exist.

Yes, people will pay for the Fox News Channel, despite the fact that the general feeling, one created by the Internet, is that everything should be free.

The digital world is one that has sort of a unique characteristic, where it's a place in which it's very easy for the value of content to fall.

The Internet was full of sites producing content for free, in the hope that somehow they'd generate revenue from sources that never materialized, whether it was advertising, subscriptions, or a wing and a prayer.

Big media companies have lots of money and content, but they have no way to tap into a good base of users.

Think of any news site on the web that sells subscriptions; AOL has four times as many people as the largest subscription service. We have people who pay to use our products and services, and they are heavily engaged in our content.

You can get any film now basically for free, and that's where I think the model we're talking about is - if you give people what they want, how they want it and when they want it, they're more likely to pay for it.

We live in the Internet age. Everyone wants clicks. Clicks are what sells.

I don't think that Yahoo or any other Internet company should try to become a television network. We will be nowhere if we have to create our own content.

Yes, the world is now flat for publishing as well.

One of the things that is counterintuitive about BuzzFeed is that there's not a natural corollary to what we're doing because it isn't possible to distribute content through word-of-mouth in print.

The Internet is all about accessing entertainment. Realistically, 50 to 80 percent of all traffic is people downloading stuff for free. If you can turn that huge market share into something that you can monetize, even if it is just with ads, you will end up making more money than with all other revenue streams combined.

Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust - it has a business model that either works or it doesn't.

The Internet is the ultimate vanity-publishing medium, and therefore, the ultimate place for those of us who like to watch. The Internet can reach an audience at lower cost than any medium before it.

The business model for content is to be paid for it. You can be paid for it either though advertising or subscriptions or some new invention, but right now what we've got is advertising revenue and subscription revenue as the only way to be paid for content.

People have paid for content. They always have.

We knew when we started the Daily Muse, we wanted a recruiting-focused business model rather than an advertising-focused one. We felt like publishers were being forced to go to more and more extreme lengths to monetize through advertising.

The original idea was to make it easy to publish content on the Web and find an audience. What we learned from publishers is that the thing they want the most is more readers and more revenue.