All Posts Tagged With: "memberships"

I think it’s safe to say that what Walter Isaacson and Steven Brill started — a wave of newspaper websites putting up “metered paywalls” where there’s a subscription or membership fee required for site visitors who want to read more than X number of articles per month — has taken hold in a big way.

It’s not yet that a majority of newspaper websites have adopted this model, but more and more keep announcing just that. The latest: the San Diego U-T (formerly known as the Union-Tribune). The trend has spread to Australian newspapers.

“Hey, I’ve got an original idea! Let’s all follow NYTimes.com!!”

It’s often said that newspaper publishers act like sheep, and that’s clearly the case with “going paid” online. Nearly all the announcements are for programs that mimic NYTimes.com’s “metered paywall” model, where for newspaper websites, users can view 10 or 15 or sometimes 20 articles per month without needing to be paying subscribers or members. Most, too, make their walls “leaky”; e.g., you can just type a headline into a search engine and view a story, even if you’ve bumped past the free-article limit, because you’re coming into the news site from an external source.

Umm, did anyone think that maybe this “X free articles per month” model is not the best one?! Or did everyone just go into sheep mode?

A modest alternative proposal

How about this as an alternative for newspapers that wish to get some portion of their online audience to pay for reading their content:

• Instead of 10 or 15 or whatever “free reads” per month for non-subscribers, make the top 10 (or pick another number) articles of the day free to view for non-subscribers.
• Mix up that selection each day. A columnist who has a great piece one day would be in the free top 10, but not regularly. A review of a blockbuster movie or even a great recipe story might be in a day’s top 10 free reads, but reviews and food stories wouldn’t be included often.

Of course, you’ll notice that I’m suggesting that news website publishers “give away” a lot more content than they do following the “sheep model.” Ten free reads a day: about 300 articles a month; five free a day: 150. It’s nowhere near as skimpy as 10 or 15 articles a month which has become the norm.

Oh well, does everyone really need to know what’s happening in Syria, or that the City Council banned drinking diet sodas in public parks?

The other major difference is that with the sheep model, the non-paying user gets to select what articles to read. He/she might use up the monthly free allotment on coverage of Justin Bieber and the Kardashians, or local stories about bears in garbage cans and drunken co-eds invading people’s houses. (The latter is for real here in Boulder, Colorado; this spring a drunken female student got shot when she stumbled her way into an occupied bedroom where the homeowner kept a loaded gun next to the bed. Yes, she survived.) Oh well, does everyone really need to know what’s happening in Syria, or that the City Council banned drinking diet sodas in public parks?

What I’m suggesting is putting editors back in the driver’s seat (to a degree), by selecting the best 10 (or pick your number) articles or other news content of the day for non-paying website users. The advantage is pretty obvious: Non-paying readers of a newspaper website will be reasonably well informed about the most significant things going on in their communities.

While running a newspaper (and a news website) is a business in most cases, newspapers continue to have a public-service role. I will argue that keeping all of the community’s citizens informed — including those who will never pay a newspaper company a dime — is a good thing. The sheep paywall model doesn’t do that anywhere near as well.

A better bottom line?

What about attracting non-subscribers to start paying for news? I think this model can work, though someone heading a newspaper will have to wake up from sheep mode and give it a try. (Sharp readers will know that the “top stories of the day are free” model already is in practice on the New York Times’ smartphone and tablet apps — but not on the Times’ website.)

Are you sheep, following the (apparently successful) lead of NYTimes.com? Or can you think and act for yourselves?

We can think of the top 10 free articles a day as a marketing technique for a paid digital subscription or membership. If the free web reader enjoys a stellar columnist but only gets to read her work once every couple of weeks or so, that’s incentive to pay for a digital subscription or membership. If a newspaper website has particularly good, say, technology or automotive news coverage, and an online reader only sees the occasional tech or auto story when it makes it into the daily top 10, that’s significant incentive to pay for full access to the news site’s complete content.

Will the model I’m promoting here result in more people deciding that reading the top 10 news articles a day selected by a newspaper website’s editors, without having to pay anything, is enough, so they won’t upgrade to a full-access digital subscription or membership? I don’t have data to back it up, but my educated guess is that if “X” in “X articles per day selected by our editors” is the right number, this model will do at least as well at growing paid digital subscriptions/memberships as the “10 (or 15 or 20) articles per month” sheep model. I’ll place my money on it doing better at enticing more news-website readers to upgrade to paid subscriptions or memberships.

And if I’m right, then citizens in newspapers’ communities will be better informed, even if they choose not to pay for digital news access, and/or print-edition delivery.

So, newspaper publishers: Do you care about news knowledge and news literacy among the citizens of the community you serve? Are you sheep, following the (apparently successful) lead of NYTimes.com? Or can you think and act for yourselves?

Can you try something different, if it makes more sense in the grand scheme of things?

The word “paywall” as applied to news websites sucks. It’s a negative word. If a consumer hears that a favorite news site is putting up a “paywall,” the response is highly likely to be: avoid!

Some news-site user monetization systems truly are “paywalls.” I’m fine with saying that The Times‘ (the UK one) website has a paywall, since you can’t read anything on that site without first taking out a paid subscription — other than rare occasions when The Times drops its paywall, such as it did when the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was taking place. (As a way for a news organization to get people to pay for reading content online, The Times’ approach is perhaps the dumbest one in existence. Latest reports put its digital subscriber base at 120,000; for a paper of its stature, I’d expect that figure to be much higher with a more-intelligent digital pay model.)

Don’t block people with a “wall”; entice premium users in.

The New York Times’ website, by contrast, does not have a “paywall” (if you ask me), though a large number of writers insist on calling the site’s payment model by that term.

It’s often said that NYTimes.com has a “porous paywall,” which is also “metered.” Translation: If you don’t want to pay for an online subscription (or a print subscription which includes full online access), you can visit the site and view up to 10 articles a month, after which you’ll have to buy a subscription for more. That’s the metered part. The porous part means that you can read more than 10 articles in a month if you click through to a NYTimes.com article from another source that’s providing a link to it — such as a search engine (including news search engines), a blog, or a social-media site like Twitter or Facebook. Those article reads don’t count toward your free monthly article allotment if you’re not a paying subscriber.

NYTimes.com is further porous to the at-least-somewhat technically inclined. It doesn’t take much sophistication on a web browser to defeat the 10-a-month limit. If told that you’ve reached your free limit, you can continue reading NYT articles online by: 1) lopping off the last part of the article URL, after and including the question mark, and refreshing the page; 2) clearing your NYTimes.com cookies from your browser and starting a new browser session; 3) copying the headline into a search engine to find the article, then clicking that link; 4) following NYTimes.com on Twitter and clicking through to articles from there; or 5) setting up multiple free accounts on separate devices (laptop, tablet, smartphone) so that you can read 10 articles a month on each.

Some media experts have suggested that NYTimes.com really is using a “donation model,” since it’s so easy to avoid paying and still read more than 10 of its articles a month. The logic goes: The people who are paying NYT’s “demanded” monthly fee actually are those who want to support Times journalism. It’s not that far removed from the NPR model of funding a serious journalism enterprise; public-radio supporters become “members,” and that’s essentially what NYTimes.com subscribers are. That approach by the New York Times (with upward of 400,000 paying digital subscribers) appears to be working much better than The Times’ (UK) “hard paywall” model.

Perhaps I’m just getting into a semantic argument, but I think that what NYTimes.com actually has established is a “freemium” content system. This is especially obvious on its mobile apps, but it’s also the case on the Times website.

• NYTimes.com smartphone app: Without paying, you can read all the articles in the Top News section, every day; every other section on the app when tapped will prompt you for payment to read articles within. But reading NYT’s selection of top stories and nothing else on the app will keep you pretty well informed — for free. If that’s not enough, you pay to upgrade: Purchase a digital subscription. That’s the freemium model. The iPad app for NYTimes.com works the same way; the pricing is just different.
• NYTimes.com website: I’d argue that the website likewise uses a freemium model. If you can live with reading only 10 free articles a month from the Times, then you’re at the free level. Pay for a subscription to see NYTimes.com’s full content and you’ve bought into its premium upgrade.

What I’d like to see NYTimes.com do is market the “premium” access to its news content as a “membership” offer

Actually, I think that publicly calling the NYTimes.com pay model “freemium” to an audience of news consumers is as foolish as calling it a “paywall.” Both are terms for media geeks.

What I’d like to see NYTimes.com do — and other news sites that in growing numbers are adopting a similar model for getting online users to pay to read news — is market the “premium” access to its news content as a “membership” offer. “Become a member and read everything that the New York Times has to offer on your computer or mobile device. Non-members can read up to 10 articles a month online or read ‘Top News’ articles daily on the Times’ mobile apps.”

Then, if we can scratch the word “paywall” out of the discussion and keep it out of any and all marketing communication, we can work on making the most out of digital “memberships.” The base membership can be what’s described above: simple full access to all news content. A higher-priced membership can be that plus other benefits: discounts to physical NYT-sponsored events; free participation in online events or webinars or Google Hangouts with newsmakers and Times journalists; complementary memberships in a NYTimes.com wine club; etc.

As more newspapers have copied the NYTimes.com payment model on their own websites, we’ve seen a wave of coverage about this sea change. And too often, the word “paywall” gets bandied about and published in news articles. That drives me nuts, because it’s not doing newspaper websites any good.

I’ve written before that for news websites and their supplementary mobile apps, a “membership model” is the best way to go. I’d add that a “freemium” approach is inherent in the membership model (or should be). I hope that the industry might take a look again at this model for getting online and mobile-device users to pay something, and thus get newspapers away from being so dependent on online advertising revenues.

The reality is this: NYTimes.com and any other news site that copies its user-payment model will have a large group of loyal free users (i.e., “non-members”) and a smaller group of paying users (“members”). We media geeks can look at this and understand that’s it’s an application of the “freemium” model. Consumers of news can recognize that their choice is to be a (paying) member or a non-member.

That sounds so much more amenable than “hitting the paywall.”

I’ve been getting some pushback on my previous blog item about Newsday’s decision to put up a subscription wall to its website content except for Newsday print subscribers and subscribers of Optimum Online cable/Internet service (same ownership). This actually is a good business model for Newsday because of its unique position, though it probably could not be duplicated elsewhere, the critics suggest.

Sorry, I don’t buy it.

Consider this: Instead of a “no trespassing, freeloaders!” subscription wall, what if Newsday.com had instead come up with a special Newsday membership program? It could include all sorts of goodies that I’ve written about before with news membership schemes: premium news content and services; free or discounted tickets, or preferred seating, to news-related public lectures or other events; free iPhone or smart-phone custom news app; and (most importantly, in my view) lots of killer discounts and free deals from participating Newsday advertisers.

The memberships are given free to Newsday print subscribers and Optimum Online customers. Others pay a fee to be a member (let’s say $5 a week, the same as the cost of a web-only subscription). The difference is that the current Newsday strategy is forced; the membership option is voluntary. That is, with voluntary memberships, anyone can view Newsday.com content in full for free. So if you live in Manhattan and want New York news online, you can find it at NYTimes.com, NYDailyNews.com, NYPost.com, or Newsday.com. With Newsday’s current strategy, most new Yorkers will stick to the other three newspaper websites.

AND, to make matters worse, the forced subscription program has cut Newsday off from Google and the traffic it can send, and reduced the paper’s influence in the world outside of Long Island.

With a voluntary membership approach, Newsday would be selling something UNIQUE: its membership program offerings. With its existing strategy, it’s trying to sell COMMODITY news content. That can’t work.

Take a look at the left column of this blog, at the top just under the masthead, and you’ll see something new. It’s an experimental counter that tracks your personal usage on just this site. [Clarification: you may not see the counter widget until you've clicked around to a story or two on this site.] Called SurfShare and developed by NewsCloud‘s Jeff Reifman, in time you’ll see more sites carry this widget.

Thus, for those participating sites that you visit, you’ll get a quick visual cue of how often you view those sites. It’s valuable feedback (I think), because with all the websites and blogs that most people visit in a typical day, you may not be fully aware of which ones you frequent often. (Be sure to enable your Facebook Connect connection on SurfShare, then it will soon track you across different computers, not just a single one.)

For publishers, the SurfShare personalized, site-specific stats for each user represent opportunity to make money by identifying your most faithful and frequent visitors. I’ll explain that in a bit.

For a more complete explanation of SurfShare, read Reifman’s blog post yesterday announcing the alpha launch.

SurfShare already has some nifty features such as, for the site visitor, a searchable, auto-tagged listing of all stories viewed on participating sites, and a widget that shows which of your Facebook friends have read a story; and for the publisher, a widget that shows a specific site’s most popular pages. More useful widgets are coming, Reifman says, such as a feature of SurfShare.org that will recommend stories your friends have read.

Now, back to that money thing. I think SurfShare is a smart idea, for one reason, because it helps a site publisher or blogger identify their “best customers” and most-frequent visitors. For example, with SurfShare, Reifman soon will add the ability for a participating site publisher to take actions after an individual user has visited the site, say, 10 times, or read 10 articles.

Examples of what action a publisher might take are many:

• A blog owner might after a visitor has read 10 articles redirect to a page that says some thing like, “Hey, I noticed that you seem to like my blog! Thanks for being a regular reader. I write this blog in my spare time, and if you’d like me to continue, I’d love it if you click the donate button below and send me whatever amount you’d like to support my writing. Thanks!”
• On the opposite extreme, a news publisher might decide that once a site visitor has read, say, 10 stories that he/she should start paying, and demand signing up for a micropayment account where each article read costs 1 cent. (This might hook into payments systems like those coming from Journalism Online, BitCents, or Google Checkout, or be part of SurfShare’s future options.)
• A site owner could use the user tracking to identify the best prospects for premium memberships. For example, The Times (of London) website could offer visitors a discount on its £50-a-year News+ premium online membership after they’ve read 10 articles on the site — and if no response, perhaps an even steeper discount after 20 articles. (See my most recent blog item about Times+.)
• A news site might notice that a visitor has viewed 10 sports pages, then offer a sports premium membership or suggest an e-commerce purchase (e.g., souvenir Super Bowl book) at a discount.

There are so many possibilities for what a blog or site publisher could experiment with using this approach. While some smart media companies with sophisticated publishing and marketing systems may already have tried such tactics, SurfShare appears as an opportunity for small sites and blogs to take advantage of new revenue-generating strategies based on tracking individual users’ behavior and identifying their best and most loyal online visitors.

Installation involves add a few lines of Javascript to your site, and a WordPress plug-in is planned. You can add your site to SurfShare and pick up the code from this webpage.

I have a bias toward rewarding frequent visitors to a specific website or blog. I’d much rather offer the person who’s read 20 stories on my food-related site in the last week a discount or 2-for-1 meal coupon from an advertising restaurant, or offer a 25% discount on a recipe book that I’ll sell them, than force them to subscribe or start paying per article. Reifman has a differing view and likes the micropayment model. But the great thing about technology like SurfShare is that we can experiment and figure out what works best.

One other thing I like about the SurfShare model is that I think the user feedback of the tracker will motivate heavy users of a site to change their behavior, which might be to financially support the site in some new way. This reminds me very much of the miles-per-gallon (MPG) indicator in my wife’s car, which is a gas-electric hybrid.

Huh? Well, I’ve noticed the impact of that MPG meter on the dash on my driving habits. My car does not have an MPG indicator. Guess what: I find that I drive more smoothly and conservatively in my wife’s car, because that MPG indicator lets me know when I’m being a “bad” driver and wasting gas. In my own car with no such indicator, I tend to drive in my more normal manner: faster, with quicker starts and stops. The indicator in her car alters my behavior.

I think that for heavy users of a particular site, seeing their personal stats could likewise change their behavior. They may be more willing to support a site knowing how much they use it. It will be up to publishers and academic researchers to figure out how best to persuade such people to part with some of their money — whether by voluntary donation, making a prompted online purchase, buying a premium memberships, etc.

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.

Disclaimer: I think Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly is a big-mouth wingnut who spouts dangerous ideas. (Yes, Glenn Beck is worse.) I never thought I’d compliment O’Reilly, but I’ve been pondering voluntary membership models for news websites lately, and I like what O’Reilly and his team have created with the BillOreilly.com Premium Membership. Overlook the arrogance and there’s an online business model there.

O’Reilly’s website for his The Factor show is, of course, mostly free. But if you’re an O’Reilly fan and want more of Bill than you can see on TV or his free site, then there’s more to be had, for a price: $49.95 a year (auto renews on your credit card!) or $4.95 a month.

This is exactly the model that many newspaper and magazine publishers have been talking about lately, though many are having trouble figuring out what they’ve got that they can charge for.

Bill’s got it figured out. Premium members get such “goodies” as:

• Bill’s exclusive critique of the night’s show, recorded by him immediately after the show ends.
• Exclusive video clips.
• Access to audio archives of The Radio Factor show.
• Weekly backstage live chat with Bill exclusively for Premium members to ask him questions.
• Access to exclusive photo albums of Bill with celebrities and doing his thing.
• Priority e-mail. Your message to Bill will not get tossed in with all the other e-mail he gets, and Premium members are promised “priority treatment and a guaranteed review.”

In all there are 16 benefits to being an O’Reilly Premium Member. Some are comical, like the “Rate The Factor With Viewer Voting.” I doubt his loyal fans who are paying members give him much flak. The Bill O’Reilly screensaver Premium offer with the great one in front of a bunch of American flags likewise made me laugh. (Unlike Stephen Colbert, O’Reilly’s not doing this stuff as satire.)

The O’Reilly Premium Membership isn’t especially innovative, in that some Hollywood stars, other celebrities (and especially porn stars), and athletes do the same sort of thing. E.g., Miley Cyrus‘ special fan site will cost you $29.95 a year or $2.95 a month.

But you don’t see much of these paid online fan clubs or premium website memberships for news people. Journalists are too serious, and this just proves that Bill O’Reilly is an entertainer, not a newsman, right?

Actually, as the news industry ponders news membership models, creating Premium memberships that get you more from a favorite star journalist and access to the person could be worth paying for. As I reported here a few days ago, Men’s Health magazine turned its Jimmy the Bartender advice feature into a paid iPhone app; that’s sort of a premium membership, albeit a cheap one at $2.99 to buy the app and no recurring fees. Other magazines may be able to turn their star columnists into Premium memberships.

Even for newspapers I think this has potential. Consider a paid Premium membership for New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman for, say, $20 a year; or a Financial Times niche columnist Premium membership for $100 or more a year. Friedman might offer extra content like full video or audio interviews of the world leaders he interviews, and exclusive webcasts or live chats restricted to paying Premium members. The FT columnist, because of his focus on an arcane slice of the business world, can offer Premum members additional inside-baseball information and stats that business people will pay for. Ergo, a financial niche columnist might be worth more with the Premium Membership model than a rock-star columnist like Friedman, who covers more generic news topics.

This could even filter down to the local level. Could a newspaper reporter who covers city council and city politics have a Premium Membership that offered paying members extra insider info and reporting, in the way that inside-politics newsletter editors of decades past charged political junkies and people affected by local politics for their in-depth knowledge and digging?

It’s worth exploring. My gut reaction is that individual premium memberships might be an easier sell than a similar membership for an entire news brand. Or follow the cable model and offer basic news-site memberships, but charge a la carte additional fees for valuable columnist or specialty-reporter member benefits.

Who’s up for experimenting with this? Who’s already doing this? Is Bill O’Reilly (I find it hard to fathom) onto something important?

Here’s the CoverItLive archived version of today’s ASNE online chat about new news business models. The event was hosted by Steve Buttry, with panelists Mark Briggs, Charlotte Anne Lucas, Dan Conover, and me. Did we solve the news industry’s problems? (Umm, I doubt it. But some good ideas were tossed around.)

(I’m not sure if I’m a big fan of this format of group discussion. Like chatting on IM or Skype, sometimes by the time you’ve typed an answer to a question, someone else has already published another question or changed the topic. So read this chat transcript with that in mind; there’s the occasional out-of-order conversation that doesn’t happen with live in-person or phone group discussions.)