About bloody Time
AOL and Time Inc., which AOL Time Warner owns, are about to get around to doing a deal that put Time behind the firewall at AOL, so only members can see it. This is called "member services" at AOL, but it narrows the ad base, making the question one of an inherent conflict between the interests of the publication and of the online service.
Here is the solution, and it is one that can be applied across the AOL TW content portfolio, including movies and TV: Let AOL members have full access to capture and annotate content and share it with other AOL members, but keep the resulting user-made content inside AOL (tie the content to a client that plays the user-generated content, so only members can view/annotate it). You still have the member services incentive to join AOL to access the content in new ways while retaining Time's public access via the Net to drive advertising revenues.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at November 25, 2002 12:16 PM | TrackBack