On Charging for Online Content

Time, the New York Times and others with their back against the economic wall are now reconsidering that whole free thing.

Ann Moore, the CEO of Time Inc, told a British newspaper:

Who started this rumour that all information should be free and why didn't we challenge this when it first came out? I say this in college classrooms and they start to throw their shoes at me.

And so on…

My take: I actually don’t think it matters what Time or Newsweek does on the web: they both seem to be trending towards insignificance:

But some of the other Time Inc properties, such as People.com, are doing much better online. And the NYT is doing great. Should they charge?

I think they should—but not for everything and not for everyone. The old WSJ model got the Freemium model about right, I thought. For such premier titles, which can credibly claim to be papers of record and thought leaders, there is clearly a class of readers who will pay what it costs to get that content.

But what WSJ.com used to do was to offer a backdoor to free content for another class of consumer: the social media maven. Paying subscribers could make content free to others by clicking on an icon that created a URL for a free version of the story that they could use for blogging or to submit to sites such as Digg or Yahoo Buzz.

The deal was essentially this: these often influential word-of-mouth generators could trade reputational and attention credits for free content. The content would be part of the online conversation, not walled off behind a paywall, and presumably some fraction of those who followed the links to free content would recognize the value in the premium content around it and subscribe. A very nice Freemium model, in other words.

Sadly, the WSJ doesn’t seem to do that anymore. The social media links it creates just go to short excerpts of the stories, and you have to subscribe for the whole thing. I suspect that this has had the effect of discouraging people from using those links, since it’s going to result in disappointment for most of the people who follow them. I certainly don’t see the WSJ mentioned much on Digg or Reddit, and that may be why.

But as the NYT considers a Freemium strategy, I’d encourage it to revisit the model that the WSJ abandoned. The old Times Select paywall kept its columnists out of the public debate, which annoyed them and diminished the Times’ influence. A more social media-friendly alternative would avoid that dead end, while reintroducing a direct revenue stream. Free may be the best price, but it needn’t be the only one.

Comments

[currency x com:]

I don't think WSJ abandoned that model out of stupidity, my guess is that is did not have the expected results.
The best current model at the model I know is the free social media one.

Bloggers get the freedom to post headlines and paragraphs on their blogs, those get furled, digged, stumbled.. Facebookers and MySpacers throw in their snippets and views on the subjects.. People looking for full stories visit your site.

Now if you got niche content, like specific financial information for example, you could charge for the hole story/information, while offering pieces to the public, but if you "print" anything that goes in the general public category...

I just read an article 2 minutes ago on APIs, if the paid model and variations would work they would not focus on APIs, rss, newletters, etc. But this model is a good one, used by social media nad giants like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.

It doesn't matter who you are on the net, information sharing brings in readers.

Mar 12 05:30 AM

[fatcat:]

Great article.This discussion will go on for a long time to come.

The old saying"you get what you pay for" applies here.

Quality content has to make revenue,either through subscription or ad dollars...period..

Just look at how the quality of newspaper websites have gone downhill, in just the last few months,because of layoffs and cuts.Wish I knew the answer...

Mar 12 05:33 AM

[raytayzmd:]

...to me it's a non-issue...anyone, after a little web experience, can find just about any kind of media for free...more specifically, I have yet to find a website that contained information that couldn't be gleaned elsewhere for nothing...I certainly wouldn't pay for WSJ or NYT for a subscription and can't imagine why anyone else would either.

Mar 12 11:40 AM

[desicon:]

Are we so blind that we don't see the elephant? It does not matter how the product is packaged and distributed. If the product is horse manure it is going to stink. Sane people will not pay for it. Period. All the discussions are academic.

Mar 12 12:08 PM

[bcncv:]

Basic standard daily news is a complete commodity. Any company that can't deliver it (online) for free will be beaten by those that do.

Quality, in depth analysis will always be worth a premium that a more limited population will pay a premium for.

As much as most journalists would like to consider themselves in the later category, the vast majority are in the former category. Either they need to begin providing value that people will pay for (hard to do), or the number of journalists covering identical events needs to shrink drastically.

Mar 12 03:13 PM

[dw57:]

i think the NYT used to charge for some of their content. and they lost more advertising revenue from it than they got from it. and since TV and radio have been doing basically this model for how long? it seems to have worked for them. and still does. the only problem is when the economy tanks add revenue does to. well guess what? so does subscription revenue.

Mar 12 03:48 PM