A friend emailed me about an article entitled “Closing the Digital Frontier” in The Atlantic and wanted to get my reaction. Here’s what I wrote back:

I still believe the web is the modern day Wild Wild West; in fact, I call it that around the agency. What we’re seeing now is the adolescence of the Information Age. An equally awkward time for those who create content and those who sell it.

Here’s my take, from a media standpoint: the media (newspapers, magazines and to a much lesser extent broadcast) didn’t take the web seriously enough in its infancy. It was something “they” didn’t understand, and it was thus cast off. To be nice they called it “added value” to their offerings. Content was free, because that was fair market value for online content. Now they are trying to move to charge advertisers more and creating paid content sections for visitors.

The real problem is: how do you shift from an environment in which the content is free to one in which you charge for it?

Meanwhile, companies like Apple and Google were visionary enough to understand the coming seismic shift in consumer behavior. Apple and Google have figured out how to monetize the web, and it isn’t magical–they each basically framed a conduit to corral and distribute the massive amounts of content in an orderly fashion. This creates value. If I want a song, I go to iTunes. If I want anything else, I go to Google.

The move from free to fee is going to be interesting to watch. I suppose you could call the last fifteen years or so “product sampling,” but that’s probably a stretch.