Do You Pay for Prepping Information?

[TWP]

Please give me your feedback on this topic.

My personal experience, lately, is that there are a lot more "pay-walls" being used for access to "prepper" information sources.  That means they are asking the viewer to pay to receive their particular set of information on their website.

For those old enough to remember, "Mother Earth News"(r) failed when their business model changed from providing informative and useful how-to articles to selling mostly ad space for the back-to-the-earth businesses.  I see a similar fate looming over the "prepper" community.

Please note that I'm talking about selling access to information, not about selling hardware / supplies / books / CD/DVD's (which I think is just good business).

Your opinion?

[Jerry D Young]

I have seen an increase in this over the years, but much of it is very specialized information, and much of that very speculative and/or tin-foil hat type things. Basic prepping information is mostly still available free, if one looks around enough. Original information I do not always mind paying for. But yep, their are a bunch of people out there now that want to get paid for sharing the knowledge they have gathered up from other sources.

Just my opinion.

[redrocker]

I have seen accelerating growth in the number of people who are trying to shift from volunteering their time to the prepper community to trying to get paid for their time.  This appears caused by two factors:  (a)  Prepping, and becoming a prepper-leader (such as posting a blog or moderating a forum such as this one) is so time-consuming that the only way for some people to continue doing it is to get paid for it and (b) the military and intelligence services train many hundreds of thousands of people to do things for which there simply is no civilian equivalent, and so, upon separation from the military or the government, those individuals try to find a way to use those skills as a way of making a living -- and prepping is looked upon as an industry for them.  How many firearms training companies are there per square mile?  Quite a few, I think.

As to the original question, I cannot find any special secrets that would warrant paying purely for information except in circumstances such as current aviation charts, where the lack of the correct and current chart could get you in big trouble, or worse.

Purveyors of information alone -- vs tangible goods -- are finding it more and more difficult to earn a living.  How many people, for example, pay $600 for Adobe Acrobat Pro rather than CutePDF writer, or Microsoft Office rather than LibreOffice?  Since the shareware/ freeware are what college students have been using for a generation, the ability to collect fees for software is a vanishing proposition.

The Daily Telegraph in London put up a pay wall.  The readership collapsed.