Why Paid News Online Will Not Work

Paid news better work, cause the the blogosphere is the closet thing to an alternative.... and the best of it is just trying to squeeze ad impressions off whatever the MSM is reporting.

I think paid "speciality" news will work. The WSJ will be fine. I do worry, with all these papers going out business, who will actually pay for investigative journalism. It really doesn't seem to happen on the 24 hour news channels (CNN/Fox/MSNBC). They just hire pundits for the demo they are serving.

One problem is that if nobody on the web knows you're a dog then nobody knows if you were a newspaper or tv network. You have to have video, written words, and pictures.

I find the authors argument weak. WSJ.com has advertisements behind its pay-wall in addition to the subscription rate it currently charges subscribers. Additionally, pretty much all online news sites collect demographics that feed the ads that are displayed for the user. Ads are not targeted for the general audience like that in the print format.

In the case of wsj it would seem they are offering more generalized content in order to reach a wider audience to compensate for a potential niche audience saturation.

I think paid is definitely the future for news sites. Ad revenue brings in no where near the amount of revenue a paid subscription can generate per user. The question remains is there a hybrid model that can do both in a similar way that the airlines have pricing tiers on their seats to fill the planes (not everyone will pay for a first class/business seat, but that class generates way more money than all of coach). WSJ is doing selective free content and has a free registration that allows you to see a surprising amount of content, but what you get is not predictable (meaning when/if/what subscriber content will eventually be visible to the free registrant).

I would like to see a mainstream newspaper test a strategy where if you want the current news you need to pay, but over time (as less paying subscribers are interested), it is released into the free space to monetize potential ad revenue.

I wonder whether news sites could continue to give away the news for free (with ads) but charge for extras (links to / copies of source material, ability to comment on stories, remind you which stories you've read in the same way that Google reminds you what web searches you've done, ...)?