Thursday, September 24, 2009
Can Rupert convert those freeloading web people into good subscription-paying folks?
First the bad news…
…and then the better news.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/sep/24/charging-for-content-digital-media
The $64,000 question, of course is how much would they pay? And how? There’s an answer to the latter here — http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/sep/22/subscriptions-micropayments
The key to all this, as ever, is have you get the killer content that your readers can’t live without? Rupert seems to think he does, but part of his problem is the fact that other folks are giving a load of other competing similar stuff away for free.
It’s classic prisoner’s dilemma from game theory — if everyone co-operates the game becomes non-zero sum (we all win), but if you cheat on your fellow game player you win and they lose.
In the old days before the web it was comparatively easy to orchestrate the oligopoly of people who owned newspaper presses to all agree not to undercut each other with cut-price papers and frees (well, most of the time until one of them needed growth so badly they reneged) but now anyone can publish anything virtually free on the web and with crowdsourcing, blogging and ultra-local sites there’s almost no end to the amount of freely available content out there which the press barons have little or no control over. But how credible is it? Would people read stuff by non-professionals all the time?
Ultimately most big paper brand owners are going to retreat into defensive web models to protect what remains of their print revenues, leaving room for challenger web brands to fill the free-to-readers space. Can they establish enough credibility to get enough users and hits? Can they establish business models that can make a profit? We’ll see!
Meantime Rupert will be hoping they’re not too successful and that his brands can keep coming up with truly unique content we will pay for. Who knows, if it’s good enough it might even help prolong the life of dead tree media through the combined subscription model being posited here.
Labels: free, models, newspapers, subscriptions
