Archive for the ‘Online “pay to read” plans’ Category

Possibly the silliest notion ever perpetrated on the Internet is that “information wants to be free.” First, information is not sentient and can’t “want” anything. Secondly, it is created a a cost — often a very significant cost. The reporters, analysts, artists and others have to eat. If we’re not willing to pay for it, we’ll get less of it.

This is the reality behind two interesting articles. One, published in American Journalism Review, documents the decline in reporters covering important federal agencies since 2003. The other is Poynter media business analyst Rick Edmonds’ update on the various experiments that are about to launch for charging for online news.

The time when we thought advertising would fund quality news coverage has come and gone. It just didn’t work out that way. And now, we face the reality that when there’s no money for quality news coverage, we get less of it. Information isn’t free and never was.

As various schemes for turning online news coverage into money emerge, we’re finally starting to get a clear picture of the most promising ideas.

• “Pay-as-you-go” micropayment plans. I’m not sensing much interest around this one. The idea is that you give your credit card number to one clearinghouse of sorts and cooperating media charge you a few cents for each article you read.
• Charge for the unique coverage. The New York Times couldn’t make this work a few years ago, when they required a subscription to get columns by their stable of famous op-ed writers. But there does seem to be a renewed sense that readers will pay for content they can’t get anywhere else.
• Give away a little, but charge after that. The Financial Times has been doing this for years. They give you one story per month no matter what. If you register but don’t pay, you get 10 free stories. Beyond that, you have to pay.
• Give away part of the story, but require payment to get the whole thing. The Wall Street Journal has been doing this for quite a while, and while it doubtless reduces the number of eyeballs on a story (thus suppressing add revenues), it seems to be working for Rupert Murdoch.

The New York Times announced today that it will start charging for online content at the beginning of 2011. The company has settled on a plan that will allow readers to read a limited number of articles each month for free, then require them to pay for more.

The announcement left a lot of questions unanswered, including the number of free articles readers will be allowed to receive, the rate they’ll have to pay for more, and how usage will be measured. They did, however, say that print subscribers will receive free access to online content.

Before we get too excited about this, it’s worth noting that we’ve been here before. The NY Times has tried to charge for content on two previous occasions, the latest being a charge for select op-ed columnists, but they gave up on that in 2007. So the new plan is 11 months off, sketchy, and may or may not work. It’s an important announcement, but not the end of life as we know it.

Keep in mind, too, that the New York Times, like dozens of other newspapers and magazines, is already charging for content, via Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. For $13.99 a month, you can get the whole newspaper on your Kindle. Sure, you can get it free online (for now), but people seem to be willing to pay for the convenience of a wireless subscription.

Which dovetails into the question of whether today’s announcement has anything to do with next week’s rollout of a rumored Apple table/reader. According to a lot of published reports (mostly based on unnamed sources), the Apple announcement will include news of subscription agreements with book, newspaper and magazine publishers.

It’s no secret that a lot of publications are unhappy with Amazon’s terms, feeling that the book giant is taking too big a slice of the pie. An arrangement that makes subscriptions more attractive via the Apple tablet could be a game changer in the same way iTunes was for music. Indeed, the battle over the tablet market may have less to do with hardware than with payment terms.

Google has rolled out a new “First Click Free” plan under which news publishers may limit how much of their content is accessed through new.google.com. Users who link to a story on a paid site such as the Wall Street Journal will be able to read the whole story, but they won’t be able to link to other stories on that site. They will, however, be able to return to news.google.com up to five times a day to access stories to that site.

Here’s the official summary from Google’s Webmaster Blog. See the complete version here:

Webmasters wishing to implement First Click Free should follow these guidelines:

• All users who click a Google search result to arrive at your site should be allowed to see the full text of the content they’re trying to access.
• The page displayed to all users who visit from Google must be identical to the content that is shown to Googlebot.

If a user clicks to a multi-page article, the user must be able to view the entire article. To allow this, you could display all of the content on a single page—you would need to do this for both Googlebot and for users. Alternately, you could use cookies to make sure that a user can visit each page of a multi-page article before being asked for registration or payment.

Rupert Murdoch is rattling his saber again, this time threatening to block Google from indexing and pointing to his newspaper stories. The process is simple enough; all it takes is a line of code.

It won’t happen until his newspapers have their pay walls in effect, presumably sometime next year (though it keeps sliding). It was interesting to see that Murdoch was unaware that stories accessed through Google are normally available in their entirety, whereas readers who access the same stories at www.wsj.com get only a paragraph and a subscription form.

There are two other head scratchers. If the tipping point is the erection of the pay wall, why doesn’t Murdoch go ahead and block Google access to the Wall Street Journal? And exactly what is the role of Dow Jones’ Marketwatch, the free, advertiser-supported web site that carries much of the Wall Street Journal’s breaking news?

Blogger Alan Mutter reports that a new American Press Institute study shows that 51% of newspapers think they can successfully charge for online content and 58% are studying the idea. Only 49% have an actual timetable, however.

Only 49%? That looks like a pretty healthy number to me. The elephant in the room regarding this whole issue is that content charges won’t stick as long as wire stories are readily available for free.

For those who don’t know how the business works, the Associated Press and Reuters rewrite the stories of member newspapers, TV stations and other media, then re-publish the stories to other members. So if, say, the Atlanta Constitution keeps its content behind a pay wall and you want to read a particular story, chances are good that you’ll be able to find the wire version elsewhere for free.

In the very earliest days of the web, around 1994-1995, news was almost impossible to find, and in many cases the only way to get free content was to crank up a newsreader and go to the AP’s Usenet groups. But that was mostly because the media hadn’t figured out to get on the web yet. I can’t imagine them cooperating to that extent.

A healthy 68% of the publishers opined that their content would be hard for readers to replace.

When newspapers complained that Google was getting a free ride on their content while drawing away their readers, the search engine giant basically told the publishers to deal with it. Now, Google has proposed a way for them to do just that — a version of the Google Checkout system for processing online payments. Readers could create an account, then pay from media from a variety of sources without having to re-key their information for each source. The company says publishers could offer several types of payment schemes, including monthly or annual subscriptions., micropayments, or payments by the article. This is just one of a number of new plans that have emerged, and we’ll see a lot more in the near future. The Newspaper Association of America recently sent out a request for proposals to other companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Google asking for ideas on ways to easily charge for online news.

While everybody else is wringing hands over the question of how newspapers can generate online revenue, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is getting on with it. Last week, the newspaper rolled out a new online product called PG+, combining elements of social media, video, popular features and advance peeks behind the curtain of stories in the works.

Indeed, based on the marketing materials, it’s really closer to television and radio than print or HTML. They are playing it smart by keeping the pitch distinctly local, with local discounts, members-only events, and contests. The package is priced at $3.99 a month, or $36 a year, and subscribers who up for the annual package get a free book.

Post-Gazette President Chris Chamberlain told Poynter’s Rick Edmunds that the newspaper created the package on its own without going through one of the third-party groups such as Journalism Online that are trying to sell pre-packaged offerings and pricing schemes.

One interesting twist is that they seem to be trying to establish PG+ by adding new features rather than simply putting a pay wall in front of content that is currently free. They claim they aren’t removing any free content. The question to be answered is whether they can get enough takers for the added features alone.

The New York Times figures that if you’re going to start charging for content, you may as well start with something popular. And during football season in Alabama (which starts in two days), nothing’s more popular than Tuscaloosa News sports columnist Cecil Hurt.

Instead of appearing with other coverage at www.tuscaloosanews.com, Hurt’s column is being rolled into a new site, tidesportsextra.com, which will cost $10 a month. Fans have been calling sports radio talk shows all week to fume about the move.

You may recall that the New York Times gave up a year or so ago on its premium content plan that required subscriptions for its well-known op-ed columnists.

The news — specifically the precarious position of newspapers — is suddenly big news, and everybody seems to have an idea about how to ensure the future of a vibrant, free American press.

Time has a major story on the demise of the Ann Arbor News, suggesting that Advance Publications (aka Newhouse, aka my employer from 1975 to 1984) killed the newspaper “to save it,” hoping that in its new form (www.annarbor.com) it could create enough of a following to become a more profitable operation. Of course, dying to re-emerge like a Phoenix isn’t exactly a new idea. Indeed, it’s the essence of Chapter 11.

Fast Company is focusing on hyperlocal web sites that are seeking to capitalize on the hunger for local news. Make no mistake: Local media must stay local to survive. There’s nothing they can offer in the way of national news that we can’t get elsewhere, and I have no idea why they still carry wire stories. But how much money they can make at the hyperlocal game — using which model (print, web, hybrid) — has yet to be seen. While Fast Company”s breathless headline calls hyperlocal news a “100 billion market,” the story is realistic enough to point out that people aren’t swarming to local media sites, and current online ad rates make them anything but a gold mine.

The New York Times — which has its own problems figuring out what to do with the Boston Globe — seems to have made newspaper profitability a major beat, with the latest story reminding us that the Financial Times was clever enough never to give away its content. Thanks for the reminder, guys.

Then, of course, there are the dozen or two models for online payment, ranging from subscriptions to micropayments to handheld subscriptions.

Here’s one ray of hope from left field: There is a school of thought — popularized by Megatrends author John Naisbitt — that a trend is over by the time the major media discover it. Might that mean the newspaper crisis has bottomed out?

I would bet on it, but as with apologies to Hemingway, “isn’t it pretty to think so?”