I happened on a column by Julie Burchill today on the Indy’s website. Haven’t been there for a while, seems to have changed a bit since I was last there. And not necessarily for the better.

I liked the piece here – and wanted to share it with my French and Francophile friends… until I found out that it was going to cost me £1 ($1.58) per person to do so via email. Well, it would if I was to use their ‘share’ feature at the top of the story.

I’m really curious: how many people pay to use this? I recall some years ago, when at Yahoo!, I sold a lucrative sponsorship deal to Vodafone around this email-to-a-friend function on Yahoo! News pages. Not a lot of people used it, but Vodafone felt that those who did were people worth connecting with. We might call them Mavens if we’d read our Gladwell.

But, seriously, make them pay to tell other people to go and look at this content? I’d love to have seen the meeting where THAT idea was discussed.

Oh – and I would have shared a link to the story, but I don’t think I could afford it…

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