The story starts in June, when we received a phone call from, we thought, Seventeen magazine, pushing a renewal of our daughter’s subscription. After a brief consultation with our daughter, we agreed to renew. A few days later, she got a better renewal offer from the magazine in the mail, which we took instead. Our assumption—maybe a bit naïve—was that the publisher, Hearst, would do some deduping and give us the better rate.

Of course, that’s not what happened.

That call was from a telemarketer, not Hearst. Within a few weeks, our daughter was receiving two copies of the magazine, and we were being billed by the telemarketer as well as Hearst.  A call to the telemarketer resulted not (as you, my hard-nosed reader might expect) in a refund, but in our being skillfully switched to another, more-expensive subscription—to Gourmet magazine.

Last week, two months after paying for it, we finally received our first issue of Gourmet. Then today, they shut it down.

This isn’t so much a tale of consumer frustration as of the inanity of paid circulation for all parties concerned. The huge risk with paid-in-advance content is, literally and figuratively, of a failure to deliver. By paying in advance, the buyer is accepting a promise: first, that the seller will deliver the content for the specified time period and frequency; second, and more-often relevant, that a certain degree of quality and pertinence of content will be served up.

That promise is often not kept. The failure comes not so much from magazines closing mid-subscription (though I can think of at least three in the last 20 years that have burned me). Rather, it’s in the all-too-frequent failure to provide the type of content I expect from something I’ve paid for.

If I’m going to pay for content, I’d much rather do so after I read it. Now before you observe that this is a wildly optimistic approach to revenue generation, let me explain how I would pay. My most valuable currency is not a subscription fee, but my interaction—in the form of my loyalty, my time spent interacting with the publication, my willingness to buy its associated products, if any, and to pay at least some attention to its ads.

This is exactly why the free circulation model makes sense. Getting me to pay up for a subscription often costs the publisher as much as I spend, and can set my expectations unreasonably high. When I get it free (and let’s assume B2B’s controlled model, where I get it free because I am an appropriate reader), the publisher gets at least as much of my interaction as when paid. The better the content, the more I interact.

As noted previously, it could readily be argued that the subscription fee is really only underwriting the physical medium and related expenses, such as postage. The content itself is in fact free.

In my mind, I can buy that argument. But in that other vital organ, my wallet, I just feel cheated.

This topic came up in a sidelong way on the Web over the last week or so, in a flurry of blog postings and tweets about a new essay by Paul Graham called “Post-Medium Publishing.” The number of posts and their level of enthusiasm suggests that Graham’s essay may be close to meme-level status. Jeff Jarvis, for one, thinks Graham’s piece may rank near a “seminal” essay by Clay Shirky on the “demise of news on paper.”

Graham’s main argument is that content has basically always been free. When you buy a newspaper or a book, he says, you’re paying for the format, not the content: “Economically,” he says, “the print media are in the business of marking up paper.”

For my purposes, though, I’m more interested in the distinction Graham draws between content and information.  In a fascinating footnote, Graham explains that he was at first reluctant to use the word content because it implies an “undifferentiated slurry.” But, he goes on to say, he realized that his discomfort with the word relates to the thesis of his essay.  The problem with publishers is precisely that they are trying to sell content, or “information you don’t need.”

This is another way of saying that content is a commodity. It’s not that no one wants it. Rather, what content consumers are willing to pay for it is basically the marked-up cost of the medium it’s wrapped in.

This is hardly a shocking perspective to B2B publishers, who haven’t generally charged subscribers for content. And the advertisers aren’t paying for the content either—they’re buying access to the readers. So the content really is free. (Now is it also an “undifferentiated slurry”? Well, in unguarded and well-past-deadline moments, even editors tend to think of content as the stuff they fit between the ads.)

For B2B readers, Graham’s most valuable comments may be about the information business. As he notes, “people will pay for information they think they can make money from.” That’s why they used to pay for stock-tip newsletters, he says, and why they pay now for “Bloomberg terminals and Economist Intelligence Unit reports.” A bit less obviously, he says that the business of selling information has historically been a distinct business from publishing.

This is the key point for B2B types. Yes, we’re used to giving away our content for free and so don’t have to go through that wrenching mental evolution that consumer publishers are struggling with. But by the same token, it’s a bit too easy for us to forget that people will pay for information they urgently need.

(One reason this observation may seem less than obvious these days is the prevalence of the Internet motto, “Information wants to be free.” But as the Wikipedia entry on the history of this phrase makes clear, information also wants to be expensive. For Graham, content is information that has given up that desire.)

Most B2B publishers have all the editorial resources they need to get into the information business. The main work they face is to develop the information marketing apparatus to promote and distribute information products. It’s something of a cultural shift, certainly, but less drastic than consumer publishers are facing.

As newspapers and other mainstream publishers will find out sooner or later, it just doesn’t work to charge for content. But B2B people will do well to take note of the less-obvious corollary: it does work to charge for information.