Getting what you pay for?

"Why are we learning about this system?" The questioner was a student. The system was Dialog. Yet another web search interface. And not a nice, simple search-box-and-button like Google, either. Real people even have to pay to use it. Why do they bother?

It's certainly a question that is worth asking. If you add together the time that you spend getting to know a new information service, and convert that cost into hard cash, you may find that the new service you've just decided to pay for is a more serious investment than you thought.

The "information wants to be free, oh no it doesn't, oh yes it does" argument seems to have been going on for ever. Nevertheless, it is still worth asking: "How come this information is free and that isn't?"

There are several reasons why information might be free. A few obvious ones are:

• For the public good, or because of legal obligations (e.g. government-produced industry reports for exporters; MEDLINE; Esp@ce patent database).
• Altruism or enthusiasm (e.g. sites on all subjects under the sun that are established and maintained by part-time experts and hobbyists).
• Providing material for one audience but also making it freely accessible to others. (The most obvious examples are in the education sector, e.g. EEVL, the engineering virtual library.)
• Putting a viewpoint (e.g. that British is best; that you should vote Labour; that the nuclear industry is actually very safe and enormously environmentally friendly).
• As branding. This could include buying-in content that is going to position you in a credible way with your target market.

Promoting or selling products. This category includes oneself as a product; something you get on consultants' and academics' web sites. Promotional pricing and special offers have become much easier on the internet. Offering some of your information free in order to lure people to the site and tempt them to buy more, can be a sound commercial strategy (e.g. Kompass, Economist Intelligence Unit). Or you might want to lure people with someone else's content if that is going to encourage them to buy your product (e.g. any of the personal investment sites which offer delayed share quotes).

On top of all these, people may be paying for the information without realising it. They may be cross-subsidising, or contributing as taxpayers. They may be paying by handing over personal details to go on a marketing database, or simply paying with their time and attention. The authors of the information may be subsidising the content: for example academics giving away articles to publishers, companies supplying their accounts or business details, or (the biggest example) search engines, which consist of other people's web pages.

In the grid at the top of the facing page I've used a few examples ? all of which carry useful information - to illustrate the different combinations of motivation and (sometimes unwitting) players and payers.

For us, the plus side of all these motivations is that we get information content, and sometimes really excellent information content at that, for free. However, there is also a downside. Some of the sites offering free information will be offering a biased view. A company's own web site will not be the best place to go to read customer complaints, and Friends of the Earth won't provide the case for Genetically Modified Foods.

You may also be getting a second-grade version of the information: stock quotes which are not completely up-to-date; company directory entries which don't contain all the information and aren't as current as priced versions. Free information aggregators will not necessarily aggregate the best sources, but instead they will use the ones they can get hold of easily and without paying.

Equally, while the information may be free, it may also be lacking in functionality: EDGAR is free and authoritative but you have to know your 10K from your 13G to search it and, when you find what you want, it disgorges reams of undigested data. You can piece together a mailing list from the free Kompass, company by company, but there is no nice mail-merge format like there is on the priced version.

Finally, you can't be sure the information will be there tomorrow. Of course, it has to be said that this doesn't just apply to free material. After all, priced services go out of business and change their pricing models too. However, as a paying customer, you might be able to influence decisions: or at least get advance warning of changes. If a university decides to make that really useful site inaccessible to outsiders, or the Financial Times decides that free information is no longer its business model of choice, or a site goes bust because it can't find enough advertising revenue, then there's really nothing much you can do about it.

It is worth looking at the reasons why someone might decide that their information content should command a price. In marketing terms, what they will be looking for is value to the customer and the customer's willingness to pay. There are a number of key benefits or attributes that get mentioned again and again when information suppliers and customers justify charging or paying for products. These are: specialist content, reliability, convenience, adding value, creating partnerships, a global view and business impact.

Specialist, hard-to-find content

Advertisers usually call this one 'unique content' but I'd say that unique content is mostly locked away in people's heads (or just locked away). Still, there can be a lot of value in information that is only available to a few and is compiled by specialists with the unique interests of the target market in mind.

Reliability

There are various perspectives on this one. Where will I go in three years time if I want that article from The Guardian or Chemical Age? If the legislation changes, will this advice note on health and safety be changed too? What were the sources for this industry profile? Is this a true report of the Prime Minister's speech? If this data is wrong, can I sue? Is the service available 24 hours a day, seven days a week? Will it still be around next month?

Paying for information certainly doesn't guarantee high levels of quality assurance. Nor does it necessarily increase the liability of the information provider. However, it certainly changes the relationship and (if some promise of quality was given) it makes it more likely that litigation would succeed.

If you are using an information supplier that has information content as its core business, then they will be more committed than someone who is really using information content to sell something else.

Convenience

At the Online Information 2000 Conference last December, Richard Rowe of RoweCom called convenience the Third Digital Revolution. It is nothing new as a benefit, but it is welcome to hear information suppliers emphasising it. Convenience can mean filtering the information to suit your needs and cut down information overload, designing an interface around your preferences, or delivering information in the format and through the channels that you prefer.

Creating partnerships

Creating a longer term relationship with an information supplier can provide an opportunity to improve business processes and work out a pattern of information provision that suits the needs of different sets of people within the organisation. Paying for the information does not guarantee a stress-free relationship, but it generally heightens the level of commitment on both sides. It may also make it possible to find global solutions to information problems. (And that can be a literal 'global', if you are a multinational wanting one deal and one invoice for all your sites.)

Adding value

What 'adding value' means will depend on the context. It might be a service which helps you to leverage internal as well as external data. It could be benefiting from having an industry expert pre-digest disparate data to provide an impartial picture, to which they add their own informed commentary. Or it might mean using computers to mine data and throw up patterns and linkages.

All this added value should bring you a step nearer to intelligence and away from just data, making it easier to achieve my next heading ...

Business impact

This is the hard one to prove, but for most people, it is the most important one of the lot. There has been some research to show that people recognise the way in which information can improve decision making and contribute to an organisation's mission, whether that mission concerns saving lives or making bigger profits.

Management gurus like Peter Drucker and Charles Handy back up arguments that good information management can be good business. If the information is value added and convenient, there's a chance that a larger number of people will be motivated to apply relevant information to solve business problems.

Of course, paying for information doesn't mean that you will actually get all of the above benefits. Some priced services have interfaces designed by sadists, and some sales representatives have the commitment of the shark in Jaws. Some free information sites are a dream to search and provide good content. But priced information services will be around ? and worth it ? for a while to come.

Sheila Webber is a lecturer in the Department of Information Studies, Sheffield University; s.webber@sheffield.ac.uk