Wired's Chris Anderson: How to charge readers for online media

There’s been a lot of debate around free versus paid online content, particularly on news sites. Obviously, things have been moving heavily in the direction of free, but there’s been some pushback — most notably with News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch declaring that the era of free news is over. Plus, one of the big reasons for the exciment over Amazon’s big-screen eBook reader, the Kindle DX, was the hope that it would help newspapers bring back the paid subscription model of news delivery.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and the author of a new book called Free: The Future of a Radical Price, weighed in on the subject when he spoke at Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference in New York today. It’s not the paid model or the free model that works best, he said, but rather a mix of the two. Here are his four rules for media companies that want to make money online, according to TechCrunch:

1. The best model is a mix of free and paid.
2. You can’t charge for an exclusive that will be repeated elsewhere.
3. Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site.
4. Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches, the narrower the niche the better.

Naturally, there will be plenty of old media folks who continue to complain that this model “devalues” their work. We’ll see how that works out for them.

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