The contract you have with your readers

Posted by stuart as , , ,

I’m still ploughing my way through the excellent book, Money For Content and Your Clicks For Free: Turning Web Sites, Blogs, and Podcasts Into Cash (aff). Last night I came across an interesting section about the contract you have, as a content provider, with your readers.

Without realising it, we all have some sort of contract with our readers. A contract comes into play wherever there is an environment where any sort of exchange is made.

In the blogging world, it’s probably something as simple as “I’ll provide you free content, if you pop by once in a while and look at my advertisers ads.”

Where this contract can get blurry, is when people use things such as ad blockers, to reneg on their end of the contract.

There still seems to be some people using the web who have the mentality that all content should be free (of ads). This is a confused throwback from the saying that emerged in the early nineties: “Information is meant to be free”. This term has been bastardised from its actual intentions, which were that information should be available to all, not necessarily free of cost.

Where these people are confused is that it actually costs the content producer something to provide that content. Either time, money, maybe their marriage, who knows? But one thing is for sure, it didn’t appear on the web out of the deep blue.

So is a person who uses an ad blocker when they come to your site breaking the unwritten contract you have with them? I don’t know, but the author of the above-mentioned book tackles it by having a contract on his website. Now I’m sure nobody actually reads it, but I’m wondering whether it’s such a bad idea to have something like this:

• I understand that making an income from this is a privelidge, not a right.
• I will strive to only run ads that are relevant to the audience.
• I will not gate off my main content to paying members only. I understand that not everyone has money to spend, and can contribute in other ways.
• I wil always remain within the boundaries of ethical behaviour, and I will let my conscience be my guide.

In return, we might ask something like this of our visitors:

• You will respect my intellectual property, and acknowledge my sole right to determine who it will be used and distributed.
• You understand that content is not actually “free”; someone has to put their time, effort and or money into actually creating and distributing it.
• You will not use an ad blocker on my site
• You understand that you don’t have right to free content on the net.
• You will always remain within the boundaries of eithical behaviour, and will let your conscience be your guide.

I think if we all took a step back, and showed some appreciation to the providers of the content we consume, the providers would be more willing to make their content available for “free”, and there’s be more content for us to consume.