Friday, June 19, 2009
Thinking out loud about paid online content
If you want to charge readers for access to your online content, it better be a hell of a lot better than what they can get for free on The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, Slate, Salon, Pitchfork, Politico, Gawker, TMZ, SB Nation, The Sartorialist, Epicurious, YouTube, etc. It should also probably be better than every print magazine still being sold on newsstands and more interesting and entertaining than Mad Men, Radiohead, Malcolm Gladwell and World of Warcraft.
Just a guess here: It’s probably not.
People will still pay pretty good money for well-written, well-edited, well-curated, well-targetted and/or great-looking print magazines. The Economist is just one example. But a great magazine offers more than content; it offers an experience. The problem with online, at least as far as publishers are concerned, is that the Web itself is the experience. And people already pay a hefty monthly fee for that experience.
The Scott Karps and Jeff Jarvises of the world explained the downsides of online pay walls a long time ago: Sites behind pay walls lose access to potential audiences on Google, on Facebook, on Twitter, on forums, on blogs. You can’t link to them. The online world ignores them.
In other words, they aren’t part of the Web experience.
But maybe I'm missing something. After all, everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Ann Moore to Brian Segal is talking about monetizing online content by directly charging consumers.
Thoughts?
Just a guess here: It’s probably not.
People will still pay pretty good money for well-written, well-edited, well-curated, well-targetted and/or great-looking print magazines. The Economist is just one example. But a great magazine offers more than content; it offers an experience. The problem with online, at least as far as publishers are concerned, is that the Web itself is the experience. And people already pay a hefty monthly fee for that experience.
The Scott Karps and Jeff Jarvises of the world explained the downsides of online pay walls a long time ago: Sites behind pay walls lose access to potential audiences on Google, on Facebook, on Twitter, on forums, on blogs. You can’t link to them. The online world ignores them.
In other words, they aren’t part of the Web experience.
But maybe I'm missing something. After all, everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Ann Moore to Brian Segal is talking about monetizing online content by directly charging consumers.
Thoughts?
- Marco Ursi
About Me
Marco Ursi
.jpg) |
E-mail: mursi@masthead.ca.
Twitter: @MarcoUrsi
Most Recent Blog Comment
 |
|
| Jen says: | |
Masthead, why don't you do this anymore?... |
|
Blog Archive
 |
2009 (40)
|
One thing that strikes me about Wall Street Journal (paid site) and New York Times (free site) is that most subscribers to WSJ surely are expensing their subscriptions for business purposes. I think that's a different dynamic than having to pay out of one's own wallet, but it's a difference I don't read about often.
In many ways, however, all websites are just digital magazines. They use diverse combinations of information, entertainment, design and practical utility to aggregate audiences with common interests. I believe there is no reason why magazine brands can't make money on the Net – but first they must make peace with the technology. They have to abandon the single canvas of the printed page, and learn to exploit the diverse applications of the Internet to do what they have always done – inform, amuse and serve their audiences.
(Part of this is recognizing what magazines do best. Flipping through a magazine is the ultimate killer app – the ability to browse at will, work backwards through the book, and discover surprises on every page adds up to a huge competitive advantage over other media.)
But we also have to respect the power and potential of the Web. We need to use our NMA-winning creativity to find new ways to tell stories, whether it’s through text, illustration, sound, video, interactive applications or user participation.
Right now, most magazine websites seem mainly to pour plain text into preset templates. And then publishers complain they can't get people to spend time on their sites.
Magazine editors and publishers must open their minds and wallets and offer online users what they want. (They're called users, not readers, for a reason.) If we continue to give them repurposed text, they will continue to shun magazine sites in favour of other sources of information and entertainment that “get it.”