Huffington denied that HuffPo would ever consider subscriptions, saying “We absolutely never imagine subscriptions. Unless you’re selling porn, and especially “very weird porn”, you shouldn’t sell subscriptions.” Swisher cited a Penn Schoen & Berland survey that found that 5% of people would pay for blogs and 92% of people don’t pay for online content today.

Picture & Excerpt from Arianna Huffington: Subscriptions Are For Porn

Here’s the thing: free/ad-supported content is a volume-only business.  These guys work their tails off for the scoop and the beat and the sensational in a bid to keep their volumes up.  They get the occasional tip forwarded to them, but there’s no investigative work going on.

Subscriptions are a volume based quality business.  HBO commands a premium from cable subs because their quality, original programming is not commoditized.  The challenge here: you better keep the quality up, because unless you replace the Sopranos with something just as compelling people will stop paying.

This is the reason that the NYT had to take down their pay-wall: the news is treated as a commodity item that can be had just as well somewhere else.

IMO, news will always be a commodity, hence volume minus quality, business.