[OPINION] Why I'm Stepping Away From Forbes

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Source: Celestine Riza Tsuki

Make no mistake that this blog is meant ot be a hobby blog, even if I'm dealing with business and economics. This blog doesn't pay my bills. I thought about how I used to have copies of Forbes. It was in the 2000s; I was in college, and I read Forbes magazines. I thought it was interesting to have physical copies, read them, and get sources better than the business schools ever could! 

However, as time passed, Forbes applied its paywall policy. Yes, that policy where you can only read a limited number of articles, and to read more, you need to pay more. This is where I felt Forbes, like Adobe, has gone too far. Honestly, I'd like to talk about this one. I'm just a casual blogger who's talking about business and economics here. I'm also just a casual artist who makes digital art not as a livelihood but as a hobby. This blog is a place where I voice my selected views on the business/economics world. 

Honestly, I thought about the absurdity of the Forbes subscription model. Okay, I understand if there's such a thing as Premium Content. YouTube, for example, charges a monthly fee for an ad-free experience. AVG (despite its scareware) actually has good reasons to charge a yearly fee. Viruses are ever-evolving, and so are junk files. However, for Forbes, the idea of paying for all the articles, whether they're casual articles or the well-researched ones (which are understandable, given the amount of resources it could take to write), can drive me to exhaustion.

Let's think about how this blog goes. Okay, Blogger doesn't contain features that would allow me to make paid content. However, let's say I did it on a platform like WordPress, and I'm publishing an extremely heavy research post. I would need to set several appointments with various researchers. Good research costs money. Such content is justifiably locked because the cost of accumulating the knowledge is too high. Call it a fair transaction of, "I'll give you this exclusive information but you have to pay me for the effort if you expect me ot do more heavy research." 

However, think if one day I decided to make a paywall for everything, even my most casual reviews like Chickejoy getting awards in the foreign market (and I got the information from sites like the Philippine Star and Philippine Daily Inquirer) or Jollibee buying companies from other countries. It becomes unethical for me to charge people just to read such content, as if my content is "the only one that matters". I would be willing to pay for the exclusive content, but only if it's worth it. 

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