Zombie Journalism

Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: subscription

Newsday is paying for that paywall

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On January 29, 2010

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models

New York Times cheerleaders and other fans of paywalls should take note of the plight of nearby Newsday.

Newsday went behind a paywall for non-subscribers three months ago, They revealed this week that since then, they’d netted only 35 online-only subscribers. Ouch.

Newsday was banking on their local news coverage being so important to online readers that they’d eagerly pay to access it even though there’s plenty of (free) competition in the NYC/NJ area.. Their redesign made it possible for non-subscribers to see article excerpts, then they’d have to pay $5 per week to read whole stories.

Because of the low adoption rate so far, the web traffic to Newsday’s site has, predictable, plummeted.  According to their Nielsen Online analytics, the site’s page views dropped 30% from October to December, meaning that any non-subscription revenue earned from online advertising is taking a plunge.

Their editors don’t seem to mind – they say it wasn’t about numbers and subscribers, but rather about protecting their brand from freeloaders and offering a ‘premium” product to loyal subscribers. While that’s noble and gutsy, it doesn’t create any new form of revenue to fund an online product. Food for thought, I suppose.

In asking readers to change, will the NY Times change too?

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On January 20, 2010

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models

The New York Times announced today that it will begin charging online readers for unlimited access to articles beginning in 2011.

The plan suggests that online readers who do not subscribe to the print product will be asked to pay a flat rate to access articles after a certain number of site visits. They have not outlined how many articles a non-subscriber could visit before being asked to pay, but it could be anywhere from three or four to ten. The plan is obviously aimed at protecting their print product by making some pieces unavailable for free online while saying a little prayer that they can still make some money off their “frequent” online readers.

While I think it’s great that the NYT will have some system in place for the occasional reader (as opposed to an all-or-nothing pay wall), one can’t help but wonder how long their “frequent readers” will remain frequent. While I’m not saying it’s a bad idea to try out, the Times execs will need to readjust their expectations for their online readership stats when they go forward with this plan.

I know I don’t visit the Times Online every day, but will if I hear about a good movie review, interesting recipe or perceived trend story of the day. It’s in those quirky features that the Times may lose its foothold as a must-read with those “frequent readers” in question. In fact, it may have to question it’s entire content strategy.

To see what I mean, take a look at the Times’ most emailed list. Those are the sort of stories – in addition to the occasional style or column – that these “frequent readers” have sent to them or find via Google. They aren’t occasionally visiting the Times to catch up on city government news – they’re coming from all over the nation and the world to read about those outrageous New Yorkers taking their four-year-olds to get pedicures or see what Tom Friedman has to say about China.

These sort of stories, while interesting, may not have enough utility to a reader to warrant a subscription or regular fee. You can get the headlines from somewhere else – the rest is just gravy. Not everyone wants to pay for gravy. The Times learned that before when they did their two-year freemium plan called TimesSelect, which limited access to opinion pieces and other online features. They shut it down in 2007 because, surprise surprise, closing off part of your website kills your search engine optimization and web traffic.

They will get smaller traffic numbers. They will fall in online metrics stats when compared to other sites. They’ll need to be ready for that – and the (further) drop in online ad revenue that goes with it.

They may also want to reconsider the kind of content they produce if this “frequent reader” base depletes. They may have to largely abandon their online bread-and-butter in that most emailed list. If those formerly frequent readers try to stay below whatever the monthly visit limit is, they may want to use their tokens on something more substantial than, say, a trend story about designer shoes for dogs. They may not want to pay – or ask their friends to pay – for the content they used to email or share so freely on Facebook or Twitter. It may be time to rethink whether or not those sort of stories should be written at all, especially if the Times ends up cutting staff again.

In the meantime, the rest of us in the newspaper industry are content to let the Times be the canary in the coal mine. We’ll see if they stick with it and if it manages to make money in the end, though even if it does work, it may not be scaleable for the small daily or metro. I guess we’ll see what happens in 2011…

Recommended reading on the mysterious future

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On September 3, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Recommended Links

These are my recommended links for August 28th through September 3rd:

“Paid content” myth sprouts more pay wall ideas

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On August 14, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models

I don’t know if I would say the talk amongst journalist and journalism theorists regarding paid content is at a “fever pitch” (which was almost my headline), but it certainly seems to be on everyone’s mind of late.

A lot of that has to do with one of the big dogs of mainstream media, Rupert Murdoch, deciding to take the plunge and charge for content online. Whether it will work or not is anyone’s guess – but I’ll bet it will for the likes of News Corp.’s wsj.com. Why them and not the other News Corp. properties? Simple – they offer a utility (in-depth financial content) that isn’t available anywhere else. It also helps that the WSJ has a pretty affluent reader base with expense accounts for this sort of thing. Sorry, I don’t see the same love for the content of the New York Post.

Millionaire/Online Gadfly Mark Cuban agrees, suggesting Murdoch offer a combined online subscription plan for all of the News Corp. properties. It’d be bold – and it would package in access to news content to those looking for sports, political or entertainment content online.Of course, it’s also completely mental.

Aside from the highly specialized content from the WSJ (which would still need speed and delivery improvements to be worth a subscription), who would pay for this entertainment or sports content? Fox Sports is kind of a joke compared to ESPN – and if this study is any indication, online consumers of the future don’t want to pay for access to entertainment media – they want to own it.

This University of Hertfordshire (UK) study of 14 to 24-year-olds found:

  • 89 percent still want to “own” music in the form of MP3s to share and copy how they wish.
  • 85 percent of those using illegal peer-to-peer downloaders would pay for an unlimited MP3 download service
  • 78 percent do not want to pay for a streaming music service

Sure, that’s about music – but it very well could be indicative of an overall attitude about online content one is paying for.  Put in “news content” for “music” and “aggregators” for “peer-to-peer” – and it makes sense. Is it ridiculous to theorize that readers may want to be able to fully use (copy, paste, share, re-publish) content they pay for – or will they be OK just reading it under a subscription plan? It’s something to think about.

Cuban also suggests Murdoch’s sites block access to their content from aggregators with this pay wall. What he doesn’t seem to take into account is that A. It would also be blocking interested readers from possibly even knowing their content exists and B. Who’s to stop a more aggressive aggregator from subscribing to News Corp.  and simply copying and pasting stories in full from those sites? He says the aggregators would then have to rely on the AP and Reuters for all their news – I say it just challenges them to be bolder in how they steal content. (You say tomato, yada yada…)

And it isn’t like Murdoch has the best relationship with news aggregators anyway – he’s threatening to sue Google and Yahoo for quoting and linking to his News Corp. sites’ content. While that’s all based in the somewhat off-kilter media laws of the UK and not the U.S. that regard linking a bit differently, it still shows a lack of interest in actually working with those who can bring in readers.

If only the likes of Murdoch, Cuban, Marburger, Schultz, the AP and everyone else arguing for paid content would just read this simple post from another KDMC fellow, Chris O’Brien.

He breaks down discusses the prevailing myth that readers once paid for news content. It’s something only journalists and idealists really believe. In actuality, readers’ subscriptions were paying for a product that provided a lot more than just news content – it gave them access to ads, comics and a sense of community we have yet to really tap into online.  He, like me, suggests we all move past that idea of “paid content” to really get to the business of saving news with new innovations and simply doing a better job at giving readers something useful.

Editors Note: Big thanks to Steve Buttry for pointing out my mistake. For some unfathomable reason, I kept insisting it was Media News and not News Corp. that is owned by Rupert Murdoch. Sigh. Don’t write blog posts in the early morning hours, kids.

New AP plan: Taking web traffic from members?

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On August 13, 2009

In Industry News & Notes, Online Revenue Models

The Nieman Lab blog obtained a copy of the AP’s latest plan to preserve it’s aging business model. The name  – “Protect, Point, Pay — An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News Content Online” – sort of says it all (for better or for worse).

The plan is to withhold some of it’s content from it’s wire and other means of distribution, instead forcing member sites to link to the content on an AP site. So…the AP is seeking to compete with its member sites for online traffic? Wha?

The AP plan differentiates between “utility” content and “unique” content when deciding what to keep on this centralized site and what to distribute for member use. The AP’s lawyer seemed to define “utility” content as the AP’s usual offerings of traditional news feeds. The “unique” content, I’d think, would be their supplemental interactive graphics, galleries and non-daily news features from AP staff.

While I can appreciate that the AP is at least thinking 21st century on this latest scheme, it begs the question: What exactly are AP members paying for, anyway? Member-owners subscribe to the AP precisely because we want to use this content on our sites specifically to get page views and sell our own ads around it. If AP members have to send that traffic off site – why even pay the huge AP membership fees in the first place? We can give traffic away for free.

In addition to that obvious question, the plan prompts many more alarm bells.

Steve Buttry says the AP seems to be off on the wrong foot from the get-go with this name about the name:

[It] uses two words that reflect the dangerous thinking that plagues way too much of our industry today: The focus on protection of a declining model rather than development of a new, prosperous model and the stubborn denial of all evidence that paid content is not the path to a prosperous model.

Secondly, on this business of unique vs utility content, Buttry and others ask how this distinction will be made and if member-contributed content will be “protected” too. After all, so much of the AP’s state and local feeds seem to be from member papers’ reporting, not that of local AP staffers.

Thirdly – a Nieman commenter asks how will all of this work in terms of search engine optimization? The AP seems to be hoping these outside links will provide all the SEO they’ll need – but these stories aren’t on all the various member sites themselves – how much will the AP content fall in SEO rankings?

I’m sure there’ll be a lot more info out about this in the coming days and weeks and maybe I’ll feel better about it. Right now, despite what their people may say, the AP seems to be looking for a fight with it couldn’t possibly win.

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