The Sun Chronicle – Paid Comments a Smart Marketing Move?

There is a lot of talk going on at the moment – basically around the globe – about the newspaper The Sun Chronicle. It is a daily newspaper  in Attleboro, Massachusetts, USA. It is a somewhat smallish newspaper with a circulation of 17,777 according to Wikipedia.

From today on, you have to pay to make comments on their website. 0.0  This is obviously an outrageous idea because online-magazines benefit from comments, as they provide additional content. I actually often skim articles and skip forward to the comments, to see what people say (although it sometimes melts the brain). The downside of comments is of course spam, even our tiny blog attracts spam-bots, but it is controllable with modern software.

Some claim, that making readers having to pay in order to make comments, may increase the quality of user generated content. This is most likely true but it makes the idea of paid comments even more an impudence. You can see it this way: Making users generate better comments and making the contributors pay for it, is basically a piss-take. Especially since newspaper-sided heavy comment-moderation could solve the problem of questionable comments as well. Also, reading comments is optional.

Another reason why this is an outrageous idea is, because you can only pay via credit-card. This means, you can not comment anonymously anymore. What comes into my mind are the new plans of the Chinese government, to prevent  Chinese people to surf the Internet anonymously in the future. Whatever they will do, they will have to show their real names. Although this might have positive side effects such as lowering denunciation, the reality is, that freedom of speech is much more in danger. Freedom of speech to pillory politics and greedy elites, not just of China or Northern Korea, but also Corporate America, Russia, even the oh-so-nice Tibet and many more states. Once that is not needed anymore, we can talk about real names.

So why may this action by The Sun Chronicle be a smart marketing move? Well, because now, this rather unimportant newspaper, is mentioned in many newspapers all over the world. While this may not be monetizable, there is another benefit: It raises attention to the problem of old-school newspapers and publishing houses, making money in the Web 2.0 times.*

Thanks for reading

*(not that I care tho, because 95% of newspapers are either turbo-capitalistic propaganda  for the elites ( for example Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper kingdom) or elites-kiss-ass-papers written by naive, well functioning idiots).