Barry Diller is Eyeing Your Pockets (His Are Only So Deep)

He may be backing Tina Brown‘s (mostly) ad-free Daily Beast, but IAC chairman Barry Diller foresees a not-to-distant future where readers will be required to shoulder that burden.

Econsultancy.com is reporting that Diller told the crowd at today’s second annual Advertising 2.0 conference that “People will pay for content. They always have…At some point, they are going to say: ‘We have no choice, we have to go behind a pay wall…It will happen. It is absolutely inevitable. There’s no way around it. It’s going to happen. And some people will pay and some people won’t.”

Of course, the question of who will charge first and for what still remains. As reported, it looks like USA Today maybe readying to dip its toe in the heretofore forbidden waters of paid content, however the task of retraining the public to value the journalistic cow after all this time of getting the milk for free, still remains a herculean one.

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