Barry Diller, chairman and CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp, said Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, joining the refrain of media moguls who say an era of free Internet content is ending.
The media and technology executive, whose company runs the Ask.com search engine and the Match.com dating service, said it's “mythology” to view the Internet as a system of free communications.
“It is not free, and is not going to be,” Diller said Friday at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Pasadena. In addition to IAC, he is chairman of Expedia, the online travel service, and Ticketmaster Entertainment.
Diller joined a group of media chiefs, from Liberty Media's John Malone to Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger, who are challenging the accepted model that consumers pay for Internet access and then content is free. Diller predicted there will be three revenue streams: advertising, subscriptions and transactions.
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Phi Beta Iota Editorial Comment:
These guys are both desperate, and dinosaurs. They are precisely analogous to the secret intelligence mandarins convinced that the American taxpayer will continue to pay for secret sources & methods that do not yield results (see story on “Losing the Long War.”
NEWSFLASH: Epoch A top-downunilateral “command & control” era is OVER. Epoch B, bottom-up multinational social network collaboration and consensus content creation is here now. These folks may have read the books (see our Reviews) such as Wealth of Networks, Groundswell, Here Comes Everybody, Army of Davids, Smart Mobs, Infinite Wealth, Revolutionary Wealth…the list grows every day, but they have not understood the point. The cell phone, text messages, Rapid SMS aggregators, and “free” content sense-makers that monetize the back-endrather than the front end are the future.
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