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Internet Marketer...Be Glad for the Academic/Newspaper Paywalls

by Arock
3 replies
Hey Everyone:

This topic has probably been discussed to death, but I have been thinking a lot about the paywalls lately. The ungodly prices charged for real research/content from EBSCO, LexisNexis, Dialog and various academic databases.

And to think, most of the authors of these incredibly in-depth academic studies do it all for "prestige" in their field while the database companies get to charge a whole lot of money for access. Talk about article marketing!

Can you imagine how useful Google would actually be if there were an actual, cooperative, freely accessible academic network... A Utopian World.

Google always demands "great content." Google Scholar usually points to an abstract that has a paywall attached. Real useful...

Anyhow, I would imagine that if there were no paywalls with the academic source material, Google would be a much different place. Then again, a lot of the academic writing would not be "accessible" to the average internet user (5th grade reading level and all).

So, as an internet marketer and writer, thank god for the paywalls. Who knows what would happen with the Google search results if the walls came down.

Still, it would be nice to get non-eHow styled articles with actual information in Google results on occasion.

Lutzi
#academic or newspaper #glad #internet #marketer #marketerbe #paywall #paywalls
  • Profile picture of the author LarryC
    Never heard that term "paywalls" before, but I understand what you're saying. I think even many educated readers would be turned off by the academic style, with endless footnotes and often unnecessary jargon. Granted, a lot of online content is dumbed down, but a lot of academic material goes to the other extreme. It doesn't necessarily contain more valuable content, but it often uses a format and vocabulary to make you think it's information rich and profound. Okay, I'm probably going off on a tangential rant here...but overall I don't think having free access to scholarly content would make much difference to the average user. It's written for a very specialized readership.
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    • Profile picture of the author Arock
      Originally Posted by LarryC View Post

      Never heard that term "paywalls" before, but I understand what you're saying. I think even many educated readers would be turned off by the academic style, with endless footnotes and often unnecessary jargon. Granted, a lot of online content is dumbed down, but a lot of academic material goes to the other extreme. It doesn't necessarily contain more valuable content, but it often uses a format and vocabulary to make you think it's information rich and profound. Okay, I'm probably doing off on a tangential rant here...but overall I don't think having free access to scholarly content would make much difference to the average user. It's written for a very specialized readership.
      Hey Larry. I think that you are correct that it is not for the average user. But can you imagine the sheer amount of keywords in those papers! When I am writing in-depth articles for clients or myself, it would be nice to get some real information on occasion without having to pay an arm and a leg. Thank god for the library.

      I think that google is more or less an awesome phonebook and quick info source. It'll be a few years before it is much more than that. Oh yeah, and of course, shopping!
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  • Profile picture of the author LarryC
    Yes, if this kind of content was free, it would start ranking well in the search engines as these would largely be authority sites. The closest popular, free alternative is Wikipedia, which uses a somewhat academic type format.
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