Information Wants to Be Freed: How Ending Information Asymmetry Will Revolutionize PR — forbes.com

The ‘Information Wants to Be Free’ movement that advocated universally free-of-charge content (and at one time seemed unstoppable) has pretty much run out of steam. After a decade of havoc in the publishing industry, the counterrevolution has taken hold, paywalls have gone up and more people than ever seem accustomed to paying for content. According to a recent report from the Online Publishers Association (OPA), 95% of digital content publishers now have a paid subscription strategy. In the UK, newspaper revenues grew in 2013 for the second consecutive year, up 8.7 percent in the past 24 months. This growth has been driven by continued adoption of paywall plans, now in place at more than 500 of the roughly 1,400 news dailies. Yes, of course, you can still illegally bit-torrent Game of Thrones if you want to, but the larger argument – that good content costs money to produce and is worth paying for – has largely been won by the publishers and information providers.

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