Premium Content

摘要

At a time when anyone with a computer and a bit of Internet know-how can access an ever-expanding world of free content, you may wonder how fee-based content services survive. They are doing it through innovation and by finding ways to better aggregate, filter, and deliver content in ways the free Internet does not offer. Savvy content companies such as LexisNexis, Factiva, and Thomson (to name but a few) continue to thrive because they offer services and functionality that an individual can't get on the open Web, even with powerful search engines, RSS tools, or news portals like My Yahoo!. This is not even taking into account the massive quantity of content available through subscription services but not on the Web. Premium content services offer access to a variety of content—some locked in databases—that free services cannot reach, but most importantly, they filter this information, remove redundancies, and help make sure only the most relevant material reaches the end-users' desktops. What's more, these vendors are working to incorporate valuable content into the daily workflow of individual users. With offerings like the ability to access Factiva content from the Research Pane in Office 2003 or LexisNexis content from your portal home page, these services increasingly provide ways to access information seamlessly without even requiring workers to open a separate tool or log onto a service through a browser.