Archive for July, 2009

If you follow the news industry like a good media geek, you’ll already know that the New York Times is pondering its future online business model. Reportedly, the main choices under consideration are 1) a “metered” pay wall (i.e., a site visitor can view “X” number of stories before a request to sign up for a paid website subscription to view more pops up) or 2) a “membership” model that would give special privileges, services, and content to paying NYTimes.com members but leave most of the site’s content freely accessible (so there’s no drop in website traffic and thus online ad revenues).

Gawker recently published a Times survey that showed details of some early thinking about what a NYT membership program might look like. This is not necessarily what a membership program will look like, but it’s one under consideration.

I’m a fan of the membership concept for news sites looking for a new revenue stream. But I don’t like what I see here with NYT’s vision of “silver” ($50 a year) and “gold” ($150 a year) memberships. If all that’s included in the memberships are newspaper- and website-related goodies, I predict failure.

In an Editor & Publisher Online column a while back, I promoted the idea of newspaper websites creating membership programs: “Getting Money from Readers Who Won’t Pay for Online News.” (Discussion of the membership model is in the bottom half of the column.)

In that column I put forth several ideas for what might attract people to pay for a premium membership. While some of the Times’ ideas from the survey are good ones, they’re missing some of the most important enticements that will get a lot of people to become paying NYT members.

Yes, paid memberships must include news premiums: access to special content; access to select forums and discussions with NYT journalists and/or news sources; free news phone applications that for others cost a few bucks; free admission or preferred tickets and seating to NYT lectures and events; and even the inevitable Times coffee mug and free online crosswords subscription.

But the most important part of a newspaper website membership program, IMHO, should be a package of ongoing, truly valuable discounts and free offers from newspaper advertisers partnering in the program. If the membership has enough free-stuff and discount value, many people will become members because of that, not because of the news.

Yeah, I know, you want people to become members because they value news, want to support news-gathering and investigative reporting, and want the special news-related stuff that they wouldn’t get for free. If the Times is willing to have an elite, small paid membership, it can stick only news-related goodies in the online membership bag.

But if Times executives want to build a significant paid membership base that amounts to a revenue stream that means something to the company’s long-term survival and health, then it must ALSO include commercial offers for freebies and discounts into the memberships. Say, a free dinner when you buy one every month at a list of NYT-advertiser restaurants in New York; that alone would make paying $150 a year for an NYT Gold membership worth the price.

And if the Times gets a ton of members wanting deals, not news, so what?! They’ll get the extra news premium goodies. If they don’t use them, or even if they seldom even visit NYTimes.com, their money can go toward paying the Times’ wonderful editorial staff. And that’s what we’re trying to do: protect their jobs and the quality of the Times’ journalism. So what if bargain hunters who couldn’t point to Afghanistan on a world map are paying in part for that.

If you’re a publisher and want to get online users to pay for news content, you’ll have to work the psychology angle. That goes for persuading people to voluntarily pay for news using some of the new and under-development online-contribution systems, as well as requiring people to pay if they want to see news online.

To get an idea of how to best persuade people to pay for online content when they’ve been getting it mostly for free for so many years, I interviewed Stanford professor B.J. Fogg, a psychologist who studies persuasive technology (a.k.a., captology) and heads the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford.

I’ve shared some of his wisdom, and his reactions to various schemes to get people to pay for online content, in my latest column for Editor & Publisher Online:

What a Persuasive Technology Psychologist Can Tell Us About Paying for News Online

I’ve got yet another “micropatronage” service to tell you about. But while the other ones I’ve written about in recent months have the online user voluntarily ponying up some cash to support the websites and blogs that they visit or like, or the articles they value most — Kachingle, Contenture, Inamoon, Payyattention — this one lets the user financially support a website simply by voting “like” or “dislike” on articles. No money is extracted from the user’s wallet.

BeneVote, a new service in beta from a Silicon Valley company called Twixa, describes itself as “The sponsored voting widget for newspapers, blogs, and more.” The concept is quite simple, yet for all the writing I’ve done and thought given to micropatronage or voluntary financial support for websites and blogs, my mind hadn’t yet veered into the territory of “the user pays nothing.”

Here’s how BeneVote works: Website or blog publisher installs the Benevote widget, which adds a voting box at the bottom of each article. The user mouses over the BeneVote box and selects either “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” Clicking to vote then displays a small pop-up box that says, “Your votes help sponsor this site. Thanks!”, followed by an ad. (For now, it’s a Google AdSense text ad.)

You can probably guess the rest. Twixa counts the votes per participating site and takes the advertising money it earns from the pop-up boxes, subtracts its own percentage to operate the BeneVote service and earn a profit, and splits it among all the publishers based on how the vote-clicks are distributed.

BeneVote is touted as working alongside other micropatronage services. So a news site, say, could use Kachingle and earn money from “Kachinglers” who decide to financially support the site with a portion of their monthly $5 Kachingle payment, and also use BeneVote to earn money.

A side benefit, of course, is that BeneVote gives publishers feedback from readers about its content, though it’s pretty crude: A reader either “likes” or “dislikes” an article. Readers can see how other readers voted.

As with all the other micropatronage services I’ve written about, BeneVote is unlikely to “save journalism” or have website or blog publishers swimming in free cash. But it’s yet another revenue source to add to the stew. We’ll have to wait and see how well it works (as with the others listed above).

One last interesting tidbit about BeneVote: It’s being developed by the same team that created BitPass, the micropayments and paid-subscriptions service for digital content that’s been used by such companies as Microsoft, Disney, and Ziff-Davis.

Here’s the video promised by Cleveland Plain Dealer Impact Editor John Kroll (representing the paper’s online/digital side) having a follow-up debate with Reader Representative Ted Diadiun about some disparaging comments Diadiun made toward bloggers and Internet news sites during a previous video chat, which generated quite a bit of heat. (Original link on Cleveland.com.)

This is not one of Diadiun’s normal video web chats, but rather a debate between an Internet-savvy Kroll and Diadiun (appearing on his day off!), who while contrite about some of the things he said previously, still strikes me as in need of some education about the media transformation we’re experiencing. Since Diadiun didn’t exactly back off his use of the word “pipsqueaks,” I’ll refrain from backing off my earlier blog-item description of him as a news “curmudgeon” in need of some further education.

See for yourself. (BTW, the headline below in the embedded video is part of the video; I didn’t write it, a Cleveland.com staff member did.)

Kroll makes the point that Diadiun’s rant last week represents only one opinion of many in the Plain Dealer’s newsroom of 240, and that many other staffers there have opinions that differ from either of the two men in this video. I’m glad he emphasized that.

However, from my point of view, the Plain Dealer can’t afford to have too many people on staff with views similar to Diadiun’s. For newspapers to get through the transition to profiting in the digital world, they need to pull together as a team and figure out how best to play in the digital landscape. If there are too many folks in that newsroom with views like Diadiun’s that the newspaper is best and other media are inconsequential in comparison, the Plain Dealer doesn’t have a rosy future.

I won’t go so far as to opine that Diadiun or any other “curmudgeons” in the newsroom need to be removed, but they do need some remedial education on what’s actually happening to modern media.

In my previous blog item, I piled on to the large number of critics of Cleveland Plain Dealer “Reader Rep” Ted Diadiun, who sounded quite curmudgeonly during a video interview posted earlier this week. An old-media guy calling bloggers “a bunch of pipsqueaks” tends to get the blogosphere riled up.

Plain Dealer “News Impact Editor” John Kroll informs me that on Monday he’ll release a follow-up video discussion with Diadiun. Writes Kroll:

“Ted Diadiun and I have debated the squeakiness of the online world in a video that we’ll be posting this Monday around 11 a.m. (EDT) in his usual spot, cleveland.com/news-videos.

“Proving that neither one of us has the talent God gave Vanna White, it’s a mind-numbing 20 minutes long, filled with monotonous babble (and Ted gets to talk, too). But we go over several points you and others mentioned.”

OK, sounds intriguing. I’ll be watching.

(I know I’m piling on here, but I can’t help it. This requires lots of rebuttals.)

The video below is of Cleveland Plain Dealer “reader representative” Ted Diadiun commenting on the controversy created by one of the paper’s columnists advocating rewriting copyright law to protect newspapers from those who might “steal” (a.k.a., link and publish “fair use” snippets to direct online users to newspaper website articles) newspapers’ expensively produced content that sits online unprotected.

Diadiun is definitely a contender for Newspaper Industry Curmudgeon of the Year, with comments like calling bloggers “a bunch of pipsqueaks” during his video interview. Watch and decide for yourself, but his comments sickened me, as someone who would like to see the newspaper industry survive and reinvent itself. (It won’t with people who think like him aboard.)

What is so profoundly disturbing about Diadiun’s rant is that he, like too many other older newspaper veterans, get the Internet completely backward! They continue to think that their brand — well-respected as it may have been over the years — can maintain its full power in the digital and mobile era. Not a chance. That’s history.

Erecting walls around your news content and expecting people to come to you is exactly the worst possible strategy a newspaper management team could come up with. The only way I can see that newspaper companies can survive is to do the opposite: Get their content everywhere, on every device, on every competitor’s and aggregator’s websites, on every blog and Twitter and Facebook post possible.

The challenge — and this is where creativity and technical ability come into play — is to make money from your content no matter where it lands. Of course, having your content land in various places in the form of headline links and fair-use sized excerpts that direct people back to your website is the obvious way, but as has been pointed out ad nauseam, the revenues just aren’t enough to support a sizable newsroom.

I’ve written a bit lately about Payyattention, an upcoming voluntary-payment system for free online content that adds a one-click donation box to every article or other content on your website. Readers who like a story are invited to click once to donate a default 10 cents to the author (or the money could go to the publisher, or be split by both), or they can donate more with a couple clicks.

I had a fascinating conversation recently with the developer of Payyattention, and we talked about the possibility of a Payyattention contribution box following a story around, so that the author could be (voluntarily) paid by a reader even when the story was not residing on the original publisher’s website. That feature won’t be available when Payyattention launches officially later this year, but founder Steve Farrell thinks it may be possible. I hope he can pull it off.

Imagine if you’re a cartoonist, say. You could syndicate your comics and distribute them freely to any and every website and blog, and post it to every social-network site, and your Payyattention contribution box would always be there to send you money from appreciative readers.

Where the work really needs to be done is in figuring out other, similar ways that a news publisher’s content can be published far and wide, and revenue generators travel embedded with the content. That’s the future. Changing copyright law or otherwise putting up walled gardens is the past.

(Oh, and Mr. Diadiun: I am a newspaper veteran, having spent the first half of my career on the print side — and that’s the case for many other bloggers who opine on media matters, who you disparaged in your video interview.)

I recently purchased the new iPhone app Men’s Health Workouts for $1.99 on the iPhone App Store. Yes, I really should use it to get in better shape, but rather I bought it to try out a new form of mobile app payment made possible by Apple’s recent release of the 3.0 OS for the iPhone.

Till now, iPhone apps could be purchased for a one-time fee (typically ranging from 99 cents to $9.99), and as a buyer you get free upgrades as new versions come out. But now, in addition to charging for the app itself, publishers can charge for additional (premium) content from within the app.

Here’s how it works with the Men’s Health app: Once on your iPhone, you get 18 workouts that the application guides you through and records your progress. Men’s Health also sells additional workouts, called “Expansion Packs”: for example, “Huge Arms in a Hurry” for 99 cents; “The Ultimate Golf Workout Series” for $1.99; “The Ultimate Abs Pack” for $1.99; and “Build a Beach Ready Body” for 99 cents.

As the news industry tries to figure out a model for making money from mobile content, Apple has (at least for the iPhone) offered up a valuable new tool. We just need to figure out how to use it.

There are numerous news-related iPhone apps available already for free. USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times … all have an app that offers a better experience than reading their content on the iPhone’s Safari browser. Some publishers have experimented with paid iPhone apps: People magazine charges $1.99 for the “People Celebrity News Tracker,” which give celebrity junkies breaking news on the stars’ latest (scandal, baby, breakup, marriage, etc.) on their iPhones.

For a news publisher to take advantage of the ability to charge for premium or special content within its own iPhone app, it will have to charge something for the app itself. 99 cents is a reasonable price that should not scare too many people away, as long as there’s real value in using the app even if you never buy any premium content or service subsequently.

So let’s think about what news organizations could charge for within an iPhone app, a la Men’s Health. I’ll toss out a few ideas and thoughts, but I hope you’ll add some of your own in the comments section below.

1. Perhaps the best opportunity is for one-off premium purchases, as the Men’ Health iPhone app demonstrates. If the phone user is reading a news organization’s coverage of climate-change (free, of course), then the publisher can sell an e-book, say for $2, via the app which may be of interest to those truly passionate about the topic and wanting more. … The current day’s interactive crossword puzzle on the phone app can be free, but the app user can pay 25 cents to scan older puzzles and instantly download another to play. … Reading free football coverage on the phone app, the user might be able to pay 50 cents for an audio interview with the winning quarterback.
2. Enable premium services for an added fee. For instance, a news phone app for the New York Times might disable the ability to leave comments on stories on the basic 99-cent app, but allow a user to pay an extra $1.99 to turn on that ability. Or perhaps an extra $9.99 turns on the NYT searchable article archives feature, which is disabled on the basic app.
3. Delay the news by an hour. I’m not sure how I feel about the wisdom of this idea, but it’s a possible revenue-generator. Charge 99 cents for the basic app, but delay delivery of all news content to the phone app by 1 hour. The app user can, from within the app, pay an additional $1.99 to remove the hour delay. This might make more sense on a niche advertising app, say the “Washington Post Rental Finder”; for-rent listings are delayed on the basic 99-cent app, but for an extra fee the app delivers new listings right away, and even notifies the user when a listing that fits requested criteria is first published.
4. 99 cents gets you a basic news app with advertising. Pay an extra $4.99 inside the app to upgrade it to the no-advertising version.
5. A news app might have a paid upgrade that delivers alerts of various happenings (news event, house sold, apartment burglarized, road construction detour installed, etc.) within a user-selectable mile radius of your house. With the iPhone 3.0 OS, push notifications are now possible for iPhone apps; personalized push alerts could be a nice paid upgrade to the basic app.

It wouldn’t be difficult to spend the rest of the day dreaming up ideas for news-related iPhone apps and premium paid add-on, a la Men’s Health Workouts. But what ideas do you have? Tell me in the comments.