Techdirt has two really good posts today about making information hard-to-find when customers are looking for it.
The first deals directly with it by looking at newspapers holding their archives hostage by putting up a pay wall in front of them after a certain amount of time has passed. This is silly and yes, I know we do it officially but I’ve been fighting that since I started here. It’s one of the main reasons why a few of us created this. It seems pretty easy to me to see the benefit of doing this. We haven’t promoted anything about the article server at all yet people find us thru search engines. It’s really quite simple.
The second post is about Howard Stern and his shrinking influence since his move off of free radio and onto satellite. It’s based on one of our articles.
Overall, you either make your information easily found by users or they will route around you, looking elsewhere and more than likely ignoring you forever. It’s your choice.