Ask HN: What content do you pay for online?
This morning alexandros asked if HN readers would pay $5 to use HN. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467825)
That made me wonder if any of you pay for ANY content.
Here's the content I pay for: Netflix Audible iTunes
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The bigger question here is does anyone pay for news, informational content?
My answer would be no. I only pay to have my content managed- backpackit, flickr, animoto
I wonder if anyone pays for any content, news or otherwise.
Other stuff - last.fm, flickr (although its not the content that they charge for), emusic. I wonder if the BBC iPlayer counts? There's a TV license after all.
In terms of news/informational content, I have a subscribtion to New Scientist (dead-tree format), which gives me access to their online archives. But I didn't pay specifically for those archives. I was also a paid-up member of Daring Fireball when John Gruber first went full-time with it. But again, that was to get a shirt more than the content itself.
As moxy says, you can get pretty much anything free if you look hard enough. Seems in my case I'm buying a physical item with 'free' content attached, rather than the content itself.
For movies and music, I use torrents. For applications, I go open source or free -- I can hardly think of any non-entertainment media whose function couldn't be replicated by a readily available free alternative. For storage, there are plenty of sites which offer gigabytes of online storage, gratis.
if hacker news is content, then basecamp & fixx probably also count (team & product news, respectively).
apart from that, i would pay for some TED talks, for high quality game reviews (http://tinyurl.com/cn5guu), and for most of Andrew Chen's blog (http://andrewchenblog.com/).
I don't pay for content it's just one source. Show me a very good news aggregator and I'd be tempted.