I thought they were trained to expect free content by television.

I think it’s because they’re protecting the large periodicals from being surrounded by less expensive blogs and making them appear then to be ‘expensive.’

The key:. Pricing correctly is All-important. There are a zillion blogs on the Net. And people have just so much to spend and we’re talking about only the convenience of a blog’s updates showing up on their Kindle. .
$2 /mo.=$24/yr. will be their calculation.

That is just too much for, I would say, 99.xx% of the Kindle-interested.

If Amazon allowed a rate of 99c, THEN you would see some movement instead of a large fantasy. It’s a psychological thing. It’s not that blogs are not worth this or that of themselves, but $-worth depends on the reader.

People will not be spending $24/yr willy nilly for blogs just for the convenience of not going to their computer to read them – that’s my view. I’d love to think I was wrong but…

Friends have said that 99c /mo. feels like a drop in the bucket, but $2 becomes a real barrier. My friends happen to just love their Kindles and see no reason to go read Kindle blogs, by the way. So they’re part of the 99.xx %.

As Daniel says and switch11 also said the other day, exposure is important for indirect selling based on interest in and trust in the content.

But all other things are not equal here. What complicates the issue here is audience size, which is not an independent variable. Most bloggers are obscure, and it’s usually critical that they give away their content for free if they want to grow and audience. Cory Doctorow has especially driven this point home for the world of book publishing. But what he says on that topic applies just as much if not more to blogging.

If you charge for your content, your audience will be smaller, even if all or most of the people in that audience are forced to pay you directly for your content. If you give it away for free, a lot more people will be exposed to it, and with that much bigger pie of people who have now read your stuff and can judge the quality of it, you might very well end up with more revenue in absolute terms from the people who now are willing to pay you for an edited, book version of your blog, for speaking engagements, and other kinds of content and services that people are accustomed to paying for.

everything comes with an expectation of free – there’s always someone somewhere who’s ready to give up their stuff for free (whether it’s code or books or news) and kill the market.

the only people who profit are the big platforms, ISPs and some other companies and people (affiliate marketers) that focus on the real business model under this illusion of free.

the promise of advertising revenue and the increased competition has led people to devalue their work and give away stuff for free.

there are so many companies that are giving away their services and content hoping to make money back on volume and advertising. that’s a loser’s game – especially when you get only a part of the advertising income.

so the problem is not that people won’t pay for good content or for a blog subscription. they won’t pay for it on the internet.

when you create a different channel where the training is that you pay to get value, people pay.

That’s why Amazon has a $1 minimum price for books, and a $1 or $2 blog subscription.
step out of the internet paradigm and consider whether your content is worth the price or not.

I mean, I do enjoy it and read every post. However, I will not subscribe to any blog on the Kindle if I’m forced to pay for it.

Forgive me if I misunderstood. I, too, would like to monetize my blog and I understand the argument above. But putting the underlying premise into place is a feat that I’ll believe only once I see the masses making even a couple of pennies from it.

Keith (love your blog, by the way)