How Facebook and Google could disrupt the subscription model for news
mondaynote.com
mondaynote.com
I don't know anyone who does not loathe booking a flight, and I shudder at the millions of dollars spent by the airlines tweaking ticket prices, by websites wading through that gaming, and by those sites advertising to get clicks. Maybe this is the future of employment[1], but it sounds grim to me.
[1] http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote/john_maynard_keynes_quot...
Those who want to avoid the friction of logging in can pay a little extra (or maybe less sometimes) for the right to do so.
I think the incentives behind your assumptions wont match ground reality incentives to firms.
So They wont keep a guest price, they'll keep a bait price.
The rest of the time price discovery and visibility will be governed by their information of your financial state and habits (maybe just habits, if you have credit).
I made screenshots as proof. Reminds me now to do some more research and blog about it.
Another option is the pay what you want model. This would be a lot easier to implement and would eliminate the possible backlash.
This morning I investigated the WSJ. After the intro period discount expires it's about $400 a year - a lot more than it's worth to me. Instead of getting $100 or even $200 from me they get nothing.
Pay by the article services like Blendle show promise, but they really need to work on the interface.
Once pay-by-article is the driving force of everything, it will be incredibly hard for these organisations to resist the urge to cheat here and there. Send a writer and a photographer to Tajikistan for two months to report on the election? For the same price, you can get 120 "analysis" pieces on the effect of social media in the presidential election.
Instead, I'd be happy to see "casual" online subscriptions: I believe there's many people like me who read lots of sources at medium depth. There should be a range of the number of monthly article views (anywhere from 30 to 200 I would say) where the publication is important enough for a reader to commit to spending some money, but not important enough to warrant a full subscription.
Ideally, the publishers would band together and create an actual "netflix of news" with such packages for the top-50+ publications worldwide. There must be a huge untapped market of avid news consumers currently underserved by the market.
Why hasn't it happened? I can only guess that the publishers are weary of relinquishing the reader relationship to any middleman. I think we're approaching the point where they'll either have to do it themselves, or these behemoths (google, fb, Apple) will do it for them.
If they don't do something like this, it might be the end of them. The internet is good in so many ways, but it also causes a lot of problems.
The WSJ, venerable and Wall street lauded (as in everyone reads it), got bought by Murdoch's empire.
And Murdoch largely manages to support his empire by selling attention grabbing material.
Its long since over.
Buying individual articles will be another nail in the coffin - the internet has provided competitive advantage to people focusing on hacking click and attention. The best way to do this is to play to the gallery and the human hind brain.
People act more frequently on their emotions than they act on their reason.
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Worse - people are already building products and apps that use behavioral/skinnerian reward schemas to keep people engaged. So all the high minded discussion is redundant - the NYT cannot write an article which competes with attention heroin.
NYT has already carved out a profitable niche selling access to plain old long form journalism, it's one of the few success stories
What hope do normal people have to even be aware? And That's something ubiquitous and only recently being questioned and condemned by people in the industry.
Awareness of the pitfalls of simple apps is an issue. Forget the really insidious stuff being made by people with the intention to deceive and manipulate.
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Holding up NYT as a survivor is telling.
The websites and newspapers that remain today are a small fraction of the Print Media industry which was thriving in 1985.
Holding these few existences as successes, ignores the huge survivorship bias baked into the example.
NYT was already a massive name, and worked very very hard to adapt to the new medium. It was one of the few magazines which attempted - very early on - to build interesting HTML/multi media articles. They tried making subscriptions work, a move widely derided at the time as a sure shot to failure. (if people forget, once upon a time subscriptions and pay walls were considered sure shots to failure on the web).
The powers and membership of the fourth estate has been vastly eroded, and the ability of people to get past a persons defences, or to build an echo chamber has been significantly enhanced.
The recent American elections were a low throughput event, but it showed how simply tweeting allows someone to significantly take advantage of (a particular) group think.
Most news orgs are ad-driven, ergo, their revenue essentially is 'pay per click' already.
Wired had a pretty good article last week about the NYT's strategy that you might find interesting:
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/new-york-times-digital-journal...
I read about 5 articles a day on the WSJ app and website, every day. It's one of the first and last things I do each day. But honestly the frequency of "big news must know" news items is pretty low, and there's a decent amount of news recycling or articles on a subject covered the day before but with minor updates.
In terms of value, I can totally understand if people balk at $400/yr.
Personally I think in terms of "news around the world affairs you can't miss", the Economist is much better than the Journal.
They let you fill your "wallet" with money which doesn't expire, and then they give you access to a bunch of different newspapers on a per-story basis for a variable amount of money per story based on the newspaper. So if you were spending $20/month on a NYT subscription you can put $20/Month into your Blendle account and read the stories of interest on the Times, WSJ, Post, Economist, etc and often have money left over. They have a generous "don't like it and we'll refund your money" which is quick and simple to use (I've used this probably half a dozen times when the article turned out to be just fluff). The articles have no additional advertising, render well on mobile or desktop or tablet. I dropped my NYT and WSJ subscriptions and read them on Blendle, that has cost me significantly less than the combined subscription rates.
When a Google News search reveals multiple copies of near identical stories (let's say NYT, a wire service, and a local paper using a wire service), the value proposition to a user of paying for one newspaper is generally low.
Never made sense to me why the Netflix model (that Blendle seems closest to cracking right now) was never applied to accessing good journalism in one place.
I'm not in favor of this solution though, because I don't want one company to know what I read, and I don't like the idea of one company influencing what I read and I wouldn't want a near monopolist to put a tax on my news.
Should books/music/movies/tv cost more to those who can afford to pay more as well?
Doesn't Amazon do this in a way? I've seen prices for kindle books change depending on if I'm logged in or not, and not always in my favor.
So, it's not completely unheard of I suppose.
If it takes off, it will kill journalism, at least on the Internet. I don't think I'm exaggerating much. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the like would suddenly have a tremendous pressure to write clickbaity articles at the expense of substantive ones. I presume they would be fact-checked clickbaity articles, but clickbait nonetheless.
This type of business model is all but certainly not fit for traditional news content. What do you think will get to the top, top 10 lists - or more informative but ultimately less widely exciting news stories?
On a side note, L2 did a short Winners & Losers segment about how news companies made huge mistakes in the online world. It's an interesting little watch:
What makes you think that this isn't the case already? I work in this industry and I can tell you for a fact that none of those organizations are News organizations anymore. They are traffic brokers. Some of their authors still have integrity, but the organizations themselves don't care about quality. All they want is traffic. Pure and simple!
Mostly when people on twitter, or other social media, share articles which are behind paywalls, I check if it's available for reading on blendle. This way I can read a lot of stuff behind paywalls and even immediately get my money back if the article was bad.
Au contraire : if you don't like the article, Blendle has a very fast and easy way to reclaim your money.
So this will actually encourage better journalism.
At present, clickbait works because it makes money by driving ad impressions. Many readers don't even mind wasting time on such content, and those who do quickly move on. The downside to the publications churning out clickbait is minimal, because the readers have little investment in the product.
But once people are paying their own money to read articles (even a nominal amount), their attitude to clickbait will change. After they've been burned a couple of times by a particular outlet, they won't pay them for any more of their articles. But they will return to those outlets that provide value for money.
Presumably, most people will still stick to low quality but free sources, but I think there's a potentially substantial market for high quality content, if the price is right.
The big question is, will the amount people are willing to pay cover the costs? Real journalism can be expensive.
1) NYT, WSJ and Economist are one of the few orgs that can actually get away with a paywall. They might just sit behind a regular paywall even if pay-per-click were the norm.
2) Other news orgs are driven by ads - ergo their income is tied to clicks already. So they're already highly incentivized to produce click-bait.
3) If news orgs can actually make more money - they will produce less click-bait. They are 'for profit' but staffed almost entirely by people that want to do 'real news'. There are almost no serious editors who actually want to do 'click bait'. They do it because they are forced to by terrible economic conditions.