All Posts Tagged With: "free content"

Frankly, I’m surprised that it’s The Times and the Sunday Times that have initiated the closest to what I’ve advocated in the past in terms of a smart, voluntary news premium membership model online. If you haven’t seen it, check out Times+.

Why my surprise? Well, if you’ve followed recent coverage of Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the Times, you’d think that Sir Rupert is dead set on charging for all sorts of content online from his newspapers and new properties, and is “going to war with the Internet.” … That link is to Michael Wolff’s Vanity Fair profile on Murdoch for the November 2009 issue.

But read Wolff’s piece and then look at the Times+ strategy and you have to wonder what Murdoch is really thinking. (Or if his underlings are simply ignoring his Luddite tendencies; or if it’s all some grand plan meant to mislead competitors, analysts, and pundits.)

Times+ works like this:

• Subscribers to the print edition get a Times+ online membership as part of their subscription.
• Non-print-subscribers can pay £50 a year for a Times+ membership.

The tagline or slogan from the folks marketing Times+ is “events + offers + extras.” What you get:

“If you’re a member of Times+, you’re a member of The Times and The Sunday Times, and can look forward to invitations to exclusive events — free film screenings, private views and expert talks — plus upgrades, money-saving offers, gifts and much more.”

At least at this time, the news content of The Times/Sunday Times’ main website is free. Times+ is meant to entice online readers to cough up the £50 a year fee, and give a digital goodie to those willing to still read The Times on newsprint. Not interested in Times+ marvelous offers? You can still read the Times’ content free on the web. (I hope Murdoch doesn’t change that; Times+ as currently implemented is smart.)

With a nod to the news-industry discussion about how premium content online can get people to pay, Times+ members get access to either Culture+ or Travel+ (but not both), which otherwise each cost £25 a year. (My guess: The Times won’t sell many £25 online subscriptions to either site, as most interested readers will simply look elsewhere on the web for similar free coverage.)

What makes this smart, in my view, is that a big part of the appeal of Times+ is the offers of discounts and offers from sponsors and advertisers, plus the free member events. In fact, when you view the homepage of Times+, note that the special offers are highlighted above the editorial content, and presented in the same style. The message is clear: Subscribe to Times+ and you’ll be getting your money’s worth.

When I’ve heard others in the newspaper industry talk about the membership model, the tendency is to focus on news extras. Which is fine, but I don’t think news extras alone will grow a newspaper online membership to anything resembling success. Offering some really good commercial offers has real potential, though.

I’d like to see Times+ step up the marketing a bit, though, to make becoming a paying Times+ member a “no-brainer.” It’s not that yet. But a simple tweak of the marketing should do it. “For your £50 a year membership, you get £500 in discounts and offers, including 2-for-1 meals at some of London’s finest restaurants.” Or something like that.

So, bravo, The Times/Sunday Times! Please don’t let your Australian boss screw this up.

Something I’ve been tracking for months now is the wave of new solutions for getting people to pay for online content, either through voluntary donations or mandatory payments. Some are in beta now; others due in the coming months.

Currently, I have a Payyattention donation box at the end of my blog items, and I’ve been playing with early versions of SprinklePenny and BeneVote (though they’ve been removed temporarily due to some bugginess). I’m anxiously awaiting putting a Kachingle medallion on this blog to be part of that voluntary payment network, and will certainly try out others as they go live.

And, of course, there are plenty of options for paying for content where money is a requirement, not a request: Paypal, credit cards, and upcoming solutions such as those from Journalism Online. (The latter also says it will offer donation options as well as various means for required payments and subscriptions.)

As author of this blog, I’d love to have lots of options for readers to send a few cents (or dollars!) my way if they like my writing or find value in it. But this blog could easily get overwhelmed with donation graphics from all the different services!

I’ve been looking for the solution, which is an obvious one: a ShareThis-like widget that aggregates all the solutions for payment and/or donation. The first such solution appears to be PayCheckr.

The concept here should be pretty obvious from the screen shots above. How I might use it to collect contributions on my blog is to have a PayCheckr icon or (ideally) something that says, “Please support this blog,” with a mouseover action expanding to what you see in the top image above — but in my case it would be populated with voluntary donation options — and place it at the end of my blog entries.

For paid content, a site or blog might use PayCheckr to aggregate all the forced-pay options that an online user could use to pay for content access.

You could also get creative. Perhaps you let Kachingle paying network members get access to a special piece of content or area of your site, but non-Kachinglers would have to choose another option, such as paying for a subscription or via a micropayment service.

Also, PayCheckr might aggregate all or most of the options; you still might choose to highlight some options outside of the PayCheckr widget.

Anyway, I’ve been looking for someone to come up with something like this, and PayCheckr founder Allan Hoving appears to be the first. Somehow he evaded my radar, since minOnline gave the fledgling service a write-up in late July.