Sunday, August 9th, 2009...8:12 pm
What if newspapers charged for ad-free sites?
It appears the new era of paid online news is coming. Fast. The New York Times has been considering a monthly Web access fee. Rupert Murdoch has announced he’ll be charging for online content on News Corp. sites. The Boston Globe has told its union bosses it will start charging for Boston.com. Britain’s Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal, already charge, and FT is in talks to introduce a “pay-per-article” system inspired by the Apple iTunes model for its nonsubscribers.
I find this troubling in many ways, which I will get to later. First, I have an idea. It may be insane; it may be genius. I’m not sure myself yet, but I think it warrants sharing. I think any idea right about now is worth at least passing consideration before the whole newspaper world jumps on the pay bandwagon. (And I welcome your thoughts on my idea, of course.)
Ad-free experience
What if newspapers Web sites charged for an ad-free experience as a revenue-generator. My idea is news sites would still continue to run ads, but for a small monthly fee you could join the site and forgo the “vomit of ads” as one person I know put it recently.
Basically, that would enable news sites to get paid from both ends — the old-fashioned way through ads and the new way through no ads.
Yes. This raises many questions:
Is this possible technologically? I don’t know. That’s not my expertise. But I’d have to guess there is a way to make a Web site I view different from the one you view, based on a sign-on with password.
Would it make enough money? Probably not. I’m of the mind that this crazy search for a business model is turning a bit into the search for the Holy Grail; it’s a search for something that doesn’t exist. There is no one business model that will solve the newspaper problem the way advertising did in the old days.
In our new world, making money on news sites will be a bit like losing weight. You must exercise, eat veggies, watch your carbs, limit your fat, cut out emotional eating and push yourself away from the table to do it. Taking one pill or potion advertised on the early morning infomercials won’t work. News organizations will need to cobble together a variety of methods, including ads and selling the convenience of well-aggregated and hyper-local and hyper-interest information.
Would people really pay for that? That, of course, is the billion-dollar question. Honestly, I don’t know. I might, but then again I’d be happy to pay for online news from my local newspaper, as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post. I’m not exactly your typical consumer. However, this idea of paying not to have something isn’t exactly new. Consider:
- Some highways offers two options — a freeway that’s open to everyone or a toll road that doesn’t allow trucks. It’s your choice. Drive for free and have the inconvenience of smoke-spewing, noisy trucks or pay. Same for my ad-free idea. Anyone can reach the news site and get the ads, and likely most would do it that way. But some would be willing to pay to forgo the virtual noise.
- Airlines are essentially doing this when they offer VIP membership. You can sit in the main airport waiting room, next to smelly people and noisy kids as you wait for your plane or during a delay. Or you can pay and sit in more comfortable surroundings not tainted by the masses.
- Children’s social-networking sites already follow this idea. Your tween-age kids can log on to Marapets.com for free and be bombarded with lots of ads, or they can join NewMoon.com, which charges $29.95 per month in exchange for shielding your impressionable child from ads.
Now, back to why the current frenzy of pay walls is a bad idea.
- Web won’t be the Web: If a newspaper starts charging for its online content, people can’t reach it unless they pay. That means no one can link to your site. Now some who see linking or quoting as copyright infringement may see this as a bonus. Consider the recent hullabaloo over Gawker liberally quoting from a Washington Post piece. I don’t see it as a bonus. I see it as newspaper missing out on the major benefit of the Web over print — what BuzzMachine blogger and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis calls the “link economy.” If nobody can link to your site, then your site won’t get many inbound links. This is bad because inbound links are one of the ways that Google assesses a site’s worth. Few inbound links, and your site won’t index high. Result: Nobody sees your site except those who purposely type in your URL (or have it bookmarked.) In essence, you turn your Web site, which could be a dynamic web of information into, well, an online newspaper. You may make some money, but you may lose potential readers and revenue in the long run. This might work for national newspapers, such as The New York Times, because people will search for them and head directly to their site by virtue of who they are. But forget about it for the small dailies that dot the globe. Charging for online content would sentence them to a readership limited by their geographic coverage area, which in many communities wouldn’t be enough to support an actual staff.
- Didn’t work before: Let’s remember, paying for online content didn’t work before. It annoyed people, both when it was a full pay wall that didn’t let anyone in or when some stories were free and others weren’t. Perhaps the model of letting readers visit five or 10 times free before charging might work. As a reader, I’d find that less troublesome because it would allow linking, and it would allow me to visit newspaper Web sites that I might not want to subscribe to (such as local newspapers outside my geographic area that I probably won’t read regularly, but might reach on occasion through a tweet or blog link.)
- Would it make enough? This to me is an important question because in the print model, it was advertising that paid the bills, not subscription fees. Subscription fees were just a mechanism to document how many people were reading, a measurement used to calculate ads rates. Sure, subscription fees brought in some money, but not anywhere enough to keep a newspaper afloat. How would online subscriber fees be different? Or is the idea that it would encourage more people to buy the print paper because they were no longer getting online news for free. This boosted circulation could bring back the heady days when ad sales were high and newsprint was the delivery system, not a computer. To that, I say: Dream on. Unfortunately, the chances of me fitting in a size 4 dress again are about as good as newspapers putting the toothpaste back into that tube.
More thoughts on the pay for online news content debate:
- Jarvis says for most news organization “pinning hopes for the survival of news on charging for it is not only futile but possibly suicidal.”
- Journalism instructor Mark Hamilton says he wouldn’t pay for his local daily online because “despite the strength of their newsroom, I can’t find anything of particular value that would convince me to shell out.” He also offers a thoughtful list of what others have written on the debate.
- Jackie Hai, of Convergence Commons, resurrects the iTunes model revenue idea but adds a twist. She notes that it might work for news if the news sites supply information that “adds meaning to people’s lives, facilitates socially enjoyable experiences, and/or provides useful information that solves a problem.” (You’ll remember the main complaint about the iTunes idea when it surfaced a while back was that a news story isn’t something people want to read again and again the way they might replay their favorite song. I think Jackie’s point is that it could work if news site didn’t sell the story per se, but sold something that had more repeat value. I’m not totally sure what that is, but I agree that news sites need to get beyond thinking of news as their product.
- Newsy.com offers this video that summarizes the pay-for-online-content debate. One theme I notice coming up again and again in this video and through the debate: Journalists and media managers argue that online content shouldn’t be free because they want to get paid. Of course. I want to get paid, too. But the problem is: In a capitalistic society you can only charge for what people are willing to pay for. Wanting to get paid for your effort isn’t really the criteria.
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Edited: 9:05 p.m. Aug. 13: I added another link to a video supplied by e-mail through a reader that summarizes the pay debate.
I'm Gina Chen, a 20-year veteran newspaper journalist who is studying for a communications Ph.D. I want to see journalism survive. I believe news organizations need to embrace new media, change their thinking, improve their content and innovate. Read more about me 
12 Comments
August 10th, 2009 at 8:15 am
The reason this model won’t work is it’d be the same as running a subscription model for the print edition without ads and giving away a free one with ads. You’d have to sell enough ads into the copy you give away to make up for printing, and then charge enough to print the version with no ads.
Essentially, you’d have to increase the ad content by at least 50% (probably more) for the free version, and then charge $8 for a weekday edition of the paper if you want it without ads.
You’d have to create new inventory for the ad-based edition of the site (you think it’s bad now?), and you’d have to charge a ridiculous fee for an ad-free version.
I think any model of paid online news is going to have work in conjunction with the print edition. You’ll have to offer wire news and the daily crime and government stuff for free (the things you can get on local radio or TV), but then charge for enterprise reporting and commentary (and hopefully you’re charging enough to fund enterprise reporting, since across the country, we’re doing so much less of it).
August 10th, 2009 at 8:24 am
@Josh –
You raise some good points, but I’m still not convinced. I’m talking about an Internet-focused product where print is secondary and probably won’t last forever. Then you have no printing costs, or very little to worry about. I think newspapers need to wean themselves off the idea that the print ads will support them; I don’t think that will be the case.
You’re right it may still not work. But I think people would pay more for an ad-free Web site than they would pay for online content with ads, which they’ve been getting free for years.
I think your idea about giving people the basic news for free and charging for enterprise might work but — it didn’t really work before. When The New York Times stuck its columnists behind a pay wall, that ticked off many. I think I’d be pretty annoyed with a Web site that offered me wire, fires and car crashes for free and charged me for the more in-depth stuff.
We do need to fund enterprise reporting, though, so maybe it’s worth the risk.
Good food for thought. Thanks.
– Gina
August 10th, 2009 at 9:28 am
@Josh – Josh, your analysis assumes “what is:” namely, the internet as another distribution channel for print content, as is.
The announcement of AP’s content-licensing system and Murdoch’s shift to paid are signals of a game-changing moment. Until now, no one but member papers could license AP content. Now bloggers and major papers, alike, will be able to buy the same content. Namely, content will be raw material available for purchase by anyone. It will be the value added to the content that determines competitive advantage and revenues.
Murdoch’s shift to paid suggests he is ready to compete against major players and bloggers alike on features other than content. What are these features? They range from trust in the writers analyzing the content to opportunity to connect to like-minded individuals.
The possibilities are limited only by your imagination or your censorship of imagination.
August 10th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
@Katherine Warman Kern –
Good points. The game really has changed this week. What we thought as axiomatic just isn’t anymore.
It’s a good time to revist everything we thought to be true.
– Gina
August 11th, 2009 at 1:01 am
On Firefox, you can already get an add-on that blocks out ads, so I don’t think paying for no ads would work. I honestly think that this won’t work – free news is still available, and as I point out in my blog http://bit.ly/11JVa1 consumers won’t tell the difference.
August 11th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
@Daniel Filan –
You may be right, but I would submit that having an add-on the blocks ads on one browser isn’t exactly add-free.
I do agree with you, though, that the pay model won’t work. As you point out in your post, there will still be free news even if some sites charge.
– Gina
August 11th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I’m in full agreement with this:
“There is no one business model that will solve the newspaper problem the way advertising did in the old days.”
If anything, I think the news websites that do become profitable will be the ones that embrace the “long tail” approach to generating revenue. Just off the top of my head, I can think of over a half dozen things news organizations could be offering today:
1. Advertising
2. Ad-free subscriptions
3. Print-on-demand subscriptions
4. “Better” classifieds (see http://bit.ly/B2hGF)
5. Selling photo prints
6. Selling high-def video and audio downloads
7. Licensing content for reusing/remixing
8. News apps for smartphones (see http://bit.ly/3CXaGa)
Granted, some of these require an initial investment of time and resources to set up, but the technical infrastructure for most of the things of this list already exists. No single stream will account for even a slight majority of the revenue, and readers won’t necessarily go for all of the options, but the point is that the options exist. The long tail works online because it costs virtually nothing to keep an option open, under the assumption that someone, somewhere will want to buy into it.
Anyway, all of that was a roundabout way of saying that I think your idea about ad-free sites has merit. News organizations need to start trying different things and experimenting with more models than the dead-horse paywall argument.
August 12th, 2009 at 8:13 am
@Jackie Hai –
Yes .. the answer is in the long tail, and I love your list of possible revenue-producers.
Just finished Chris Anderson’s smart book, “Long Tail.” I think it should be required reading for journalists and newspaper managers today.
What worries me most about the newspaper business today is that some seem to be waiting for this new business model to fall out of the sky and konk them on the head. Not going to happen.
Thanks for adding your ideas.
– Gina
August 13th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
[...] What if newspapers charged for ad-free sites? [...]
August 20th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
[...] Kom att tänka på detta i samband med att betaldebatten åter tog fart, när mediemogulen Rupert Murdoch nyligen offentliggjorde planer på att ta betalt för innehållet på Newscorp-sajter. [...]
August 25th, 2009 at 8:23 am
here in subedari ,hanamkonda,warangal, andhra pradesh, india sold the plot in 1989 frm age 15 yrs to till date of mine by agricultural officer mallaiah-sujata’s husband,venkatayya-cpm party, paparao -govt. school teacher, indian overseas bank mgr, indian bank mgr, sold the plot for us as being purchased to them as a part of their sex life for upto 100 yrs. in place of dowry of rs.10 lakhs to 2 crores to be given to us, playing sarvasm hand over or evil spirit games and hence i requested the population to payabove as be to them and i love bbc asitsavesmeeverydayfrmrapeandmurder. They are telling as pennis or pichchalu and their bodies as their house and plot and land in the name of vaastu or engg. ofland and plot or bldg. they asking to pray them as gods as their spirits and nabbing flesh of us as if wanting for matrimony who are of now aged for their granddaughters and grand sons age.pl. help me in getting out of this.
September 11th, 2009 at 9:47 am
This is a disaster at its best. People will just switch for a free service. There’s plenty around.
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