What has really been bothering me lately is those online editions of newspapers who insist on a paywall. These dinosaurs of the old media don’t understand the Internet, and I doubt they ever will. Much of the Wall Street Journal online, for example, is behind a pay wall. So if I find an interesting article that I’d like to link to, but it insists that you subscribe, then I won’t link to it. I know that many other bloggers and online writers are the same way. Why should I cause readers to waste their time clicking on a link, when chances are that they don’t have an online subscription and they probably won’t start one at that time, just to see one damn article?
But the print media dinosaurs suffer from the same kind of shortsightedness that government bureaucrats have. You see, when I link to a website, such as WSJ or the New York Times, and readers of this blog click on a link to read an article, that is giving those newspapers new readers, who will also be seeing (and maybe clicking on and maybe even patronizing) the advertisements. For the New York Times, it’s new readers (thanks to my and others’ links), and new clicks on their ads. But the dinosaurs don’t see that. In fact, because of paywalls, they will get fewer clicks, fewer readers, and thus lower ad revenues.
Because of modern day generations of present-oriented narcissists who lack the ability to see things in the long term, they make policies and create obstructions to their businesses that go against their own interests in the long term. Phenomena such as paywalls do just that. And so does copyright.
Unfortunately, the music industry people who support SOPA (and other legislation to “protect IP” on the Internet) don’t understand that they are acting as useful idiots for government tyrants who want to use IP-protecting legislation to censor information and commentary on the Internet that they don’t like.
Those IP-related Internet bills are solely for the government to suppress political dissent. I wish more people understood that.
Now, in the past when I had been looking for a Monty Python video to post here (such as this one depicting an ObamaCare-like doctor, and this one), I noticed that, on YouTube, the Monty Python people seemed extremely uptight about people posting their videos. They felt they were getting “ripped off.” Now I see that they have their own YouTube page, and it appears that since they launched their YouTube page, sales of their DVDs had hit the roof.
But there was never any need to have their own YouTube page to “get their money back” that they irrationally believed was getting “ripped off.” You see, if someone on the Internet posted a Monty Python video, there are a lot of people now who have never heard of them, particularly those age 30 and younger. When someone posts a video of that sort, and viewers to that web page or blog like what they see, they will then go to Google (or whatever search engine they prefer) and get more information, and they will probably find “shopping results” that include Amazon.com that sells Monty Python DVDs.
I guess what I’m saying is that when people post Monty Python videos on blogs or other websites, the bloggers are giving Monty Python (or similar kinds of video makers) free advertising.
I wonder if viewers of Family Guy who saw the episode that made fun of Carol Burnett’s cleaning woman character from her TV show (for which she unsuccessfully sued them) then searched to see who Carol Burnett is (let’s face it, many people under 35 probably don’t know who Carol Burnett is). There are many YouTube pages with classic scenes from the old Carol Burnett Show.
Below I’ll post the skit with Carol as a patient seeing a psychiatrist (played by Harvey Korman). Buy Carol Burnett Show DVDs here.
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