One Final Thought

One last thing on the just-completed NFL draft, then I, like Mel Kiper, will keep quiet about it until 2011.

Kiper, ESPN's draft expert (and famed for his pompadour), is one of several "experts" at ESPN who give additional coverage for additional money. ESPN calls these guys (including Chad Ford on the NBA) "Insiders," and to access their content requires you to pay a fee--anywhere from $2.50 to $6.95 a month. For example, Kiper's draft analysis for all 32 teams is now available, but only to ESPN Insiders.

But you can easily find the same material for free elsewhere on the Internet, which shouldn't be that surprising. The most likely culprits are those fans who pay the ESPN Insider fee, then reproduce the material so they comment on it for their own blogs or websites.

There are two issues here, legal and economic. I'm not a legal expert, so I don't know how (or if) ESPN (or other pay sites) can protect their copyrighted material. But it does seem like they are losing a lot of potential revenue in this deal. Why should I pay ESPN money when I can get essentially the same content for free somewhere else? I'm sure ESPN is thinking the same thing, but a good solution to the problem (at least from the content provider point of view) escapes me.