According to Hart, publishers around the world are starting to migrate their users to the notion of paying for content and the next two years are just going to be the transition period. When consumers are unable to access certain information, they will quickly learn to pay for the electronic version, she believes. The Wall Street Journal, Hart pointed out, never gave the paper away for free having elected for a subscription model from day one. The South Morning China Post is also now a subscription service, and parts of The New York Times are fee-based. Customisation and personalisation, Hart said, are two ways to entice people to still come to the Web site. Once they're there, if they want real value, they will have to pay for it, she said. Factiva, a 50:50 joint venture between Dow Jones and Reuters born in 1999, aggregates 8000 commercial sources and posts 120,000 new articles every day, of which some customers might just want two or three articles that that are relevant to them. Business people, Hart said, are paying for the convenience of being able to source particular areas of interest. Personalising content is one way to convince users online material is worth paying for, she said. "Factiva wouldn't be in business if the content and value we add wasn't worth paying for," Hart said. Factiva, which has 1.5 million customers worldwide and staff in 47 cities in 28 countries, is in the process of changing its business model slightly -- selling more technology and services to help organisations manage external and internal content. The Factiva Professional Services division -- the company's consulting arm which is not quite two years old -- is a growth opportunity for us, Hart said. The professional services team covers three main areas; enterprise knowledge assessment -- working with organisations to understand their external and internal needs and bringing all these together for them; editorial consulting -- which better organises a company's internal information; and developer consulting -- which looks at software development such as the construction of effective user interfaces. Moving forward this will be the fastest growing area of the business, Hart said. However, whilst market research company Simba estimates that that the paid content business market will see a compound annual growth rate of 7 percent between 2000 and 2005, and IDC anticipates a 10 percent annual growth rate, Hart says that given the global economy is growing at 2-3 percent this is a bit of a stretch. "Companies will continue to invest," she said, "but at a slower rate until the economy picks up."
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