Yesterday, Silicon Alley Insider published a chart saying that the majority of online users would not pay for accessing news on their favourite news site. Infact, they wouldn’t just not pay for it, they would actually switch allegiance to a competitor. I find this strange, especially because of the differing political views between each paper…especially in the UK. I don’t, however, find it strange that consumers who have had the “freeconomy” experience would suddenly say paying is ok. Free can certainly be great, but quality becomes an issue when publishers cannot afford the best journalists. I think some sort of payment model is essential, here are some ideas from me on how I think publishers could make it work:
1) Short-Form/Long-Form content
If quality of content becomes lower, then users will continually refuse to pay for it. Therefore, it is essential to maintain levels of quality through paid access. One way of doing this could be to create short-form and long-form content. Articles could be edited down into 100 word summaries which are free, the original articles are then hidden behind a paid wall. The wall needs to be a fixed amount per day equivalent to paying for the newspaper itself, so one days access for £1.
2) All publishers adopt
The only real way to make this work is to get the publisher heads together to create a unified charging model. Given that most of these publishers are at war with each other 90% of the time this may prove difficult. Otherwise, its going to be a case of watching who leaps first. The problem being that if they continually wait more and more publishers will fall by the way side.
3) Central subscription
Paying £1 per day to access all the content form all the daily newspapers is certainly more than they are getting at the moment. Given that a title like the Guardian gets huge levels of monthly unique users, this sort of model could quickly rectify the situation. Based on the newspapers all employing the same tracking technology, that £1 would be split up based on the number of page views to each paper. Therefore, say user x visits 50 pages of news sites each day. Each page is worth £0.02. If he reads 30 pages on the Guardian, 10 pages on the Sun, 5 on the Times and 5 on the Daily Mail.. they would get £0.60, £0.20, £0.10 and £0.10 respectively.
4) Paid for Top Journalist Content
If top journalists aren’t paid top money then they will go elsewhere. It is crucial that the newspapers retain these. Therefore, how about a model which means you can subscribe to a more personal approach from the Journalist. They would have a blog, an email newsletter, RSS feeds, and a mobile phone application. All of which you can subscribe to for a nominal amount per month. This would also include access to their long-form journalistic pieces, deals on any books they write and invites to their events. Essentially, each journalist becomes his own mini-community.
