This tweet annoyed me and got me thinking about paywalls. First the obvious archaic nature of Keith Law’s reference; does anybody watch the Playboy channel anymore? The nature of television signals has changed and I don’t think you get scrambled stations anymore; you either get it or you don’t. Furthermore this isn’t the 1980s; there are plenty of alternatives to Playboy, scrambled or unscrambled. However, Law’s comparison is still apt in that paying for his predictions is very much like paying for the Playboy channel in this day and age.
The Internet makes everything and everyone so accessible that it’s hard to believe one person has so much more knowledge and insight that it’s worth paying for. Obviously Keith Law is going to promote his own work and tell you it’s worth buying; but so will Playboy, and the homeless man on the corner. There are a lot of other people out there doing the same thing as him (Talking about and predicting the MLB draft), and to top that off there are also high school and college fans with Twitter accounts and blogs that can give us accounts of the players they see more regularly than any expert or whichever scouts those experts talk to. There is also a wealth of information and statistics that are kept that can be analyzed by anyone that feels the urge. If you’re only into the specific predictions for you own team, there will surely be someone that’s splurged on an insider account that will repost the information to a blog or forum somewhere.
This isn’t only about ESPN. There are other paywalls, usually related to newspapers, that do similar things. I have yet to fret over something that I couldn’t access. Either that information comes to me through other sources, or it’s not worth reading. The paywall can actually act as a filter to save me the trouble of reading filler articles. In this case the Twitter user who inquired if there was anyway to see Law’s opinion without paying for something he wasn’t interested in probably went on his way and read about the players he wanted to read about elsewhere. In the age of the Internet, simply charging, or charging more, for something does not automatically make it worthwhile. Customers are getting savvy enough to search out the better deal, because there is always a better deal.
