The Age of Premium Information OR A Penny For Your Thoughts?

This is a post by Dave Morin that requires me to pay to see it. It is published using a new service called letter.ly

Abby put it well the other day: there is a difference between fact and opinion.

You can’t just take an opinion, add a paywall, and equate it to premium facts. Many companies make money on premium facts: techcrunch, CNN, Bloomberg to name a few. Name a few that make money on premium opinions?

I didn’t pay to actually read this post. If it is an important opinion, it will be spread. Since I wrote this as a comment on that thread, TechCrunch already covered it, proving this correct.

Though I share Ivan and Abby’s disdain, I believe that fact and opinion are indistinguishable in an age where the timeline for the dissemination of information compresses more each year. It’s less a matter of fact vs. opinion, but more a matter of actionable information or not, and time weighs heavily in that equation. There are many actionable mistruths, rumors, lies and whispers with game changing impact given when they are received. My issue is that it’s the utility of information against time rather than the scarcity of information against the effort to receive it representing the primary value driver of said information.

Now, let’s humor Sam Lessin’s thesis that scarcity of information increases the value of information. Can anything in a textual digital format with digital delivery ever be considered scarce in 2010? It feels artificial. I’d understand letter.ly’s underlying intent if it extended the thesis to a more logical conclusion; simply send printed versions of the letter to subscribers via snail mail. That might be a service I’d pay for, both as creator and consumer - the convenience of digital management for a menial physical activity.

To add to the confusion of intent, one can now use open Disqus comments on the paywalled letter.ly content. Here is where letter.ly must pick a lane. Ol’ faithful listserv already supports threaded discussions over email, so why have the comments wide open? By applying the scarcity theory, is letter.ly saying that comments have zero value by virtue of them being open? Hmmm.

One thing we have seen in terms of accretive social content is that effort on behalf of comment creation increases the value of the comment stream - Slashdot, NYT, Gawker to name a few, all self-policed and identity enforced. Letter.ly might have been better served to make the original post content freely available and have a paywall for comments. Pay-to-convey would reduce the noise level considerably and the payer has complete control over the value they receive from being heard via the quality of their missive. Incentives are aligned by matter of conviction.

The final quote from the TechCrunch piece:

“Yet, just putting something behind a paywall, does not make it valuable. But it does certainly make it harder to find. The way Letter.ly works is that you subscribe, then you receive the newsletter via email. Because what the world needs more of is email.”

Snark notwithstanding, the world does need higher quality email, and letter.ly may add some light to the bit bucket if the service’s intentions were clearer.