A popular website for Canadian media and marketing-types started charging for its content on Monday.
MediaInCanada.com now requires the reader to pay $14.95 per month or $149.95 per year to read its articles. What is this, 1999?
In an era where information should be freely passed and made available to anyone in a variety of mediums, Media in Canada has taken ten leaps back.
Jessica Leroux of Brunico Communications — the company that publishes Media in Canada — told ChrisD.ca, “The reason for this (paid subscriptions) is that we have put a lot of resources into building the site. Our main competitor, Adnews, has also switched to paid but is in fact double the price that we are charging.”
Similar to a monkey-see, monkey-do approach, Media in Canada had a huge opportunity to gain a significant piece of the market when their competitor started charging. The general idea from a reader’s perspective is that they don’t like paying for anything.
It will definitely be interesting to see how this pans out. Funny thing to note: ChrisD.ca receives more pageviews on a daily basis (according to Alexa.com) than both Media In Canada and their competitor, Adnews, and we don’t even charge for this stuff!
