Steve Rubel and Subscription Services

Steve Rubel who is one of the bloggers that I like reading regularly thinks that

"It's very difficult to survive as a paid service in a Long Tail environment. One reason is that it's now easier to discover free, open source alternatives."

I think he is missing the point.

As I put in my comments to his post, "we", STM paid online services are not just providing "dumb" search results like any other free search engines. We are adding value to the content that we publish (indexing, writing abstracts), creating better searching features and providing analytical tools (intelligence) with the search results to the end users.

The screen shots hopefully will show what I mean above. Here are search results for "light emitting diodes" in Google Scholar and Engineering Village 2