All Posts Tagged With: "paid content"

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?

Monday marks the rollout of NYTimes.com’s “metered paywall,” which I wrote about (and criticized) here last week (before going on vacation for a week). Here are a few quick developments and additional thoughts about what is an important milestone in the digital-news space:

What do you think of the NYT paywall? Tell Columbia researchers!

Columbia University researchers Shahzeem Attari and Jonathan Cook are conducting a survey on attitudes about and intentions of using (or not) the new New York Times metered paywall. Take the survey here and help them get a good number of responses so that the results are meaningful. (They’ll also appreciate it if you share the link further.)

Can NYT lower the price after starting so high?

I’m sticking to my criticisms as expressed in my last blog post about the NYT paywall. One thing that absolutely confuses me is why Times executives would choose to begin the program at such a high price for digital access ($15 per 4 weeks for web + iPhone/smartphone app; $20 per 4 weeks for web + iPad/tablet app; and $35 per 4 weeks for web + iPhone/smartphone app + iPad/tablet app). Starting high will make it awfully difficult to lower the prices to levels that will work for more than the few NYT supporters willing to help out the company.

Last week, NYT’s David Carr wrote a defense of the program and pricing, and reading through the user comments is telling. Lots of commenters said that they would be willing to pay $4.99 a month; that number appeared often. Indeed, many indicated they’d sign up in a heartbeat for a digital plan (no print edition) that allowed access to NYT content on any device (PC, laptop, smartphone, tablet) at that price. But the vast majority in that comment stream balked at the Times’ high asking price. They’ll go elsewhere for quality free news online, or work around the paywall limits, which is pretty easy to do.

Let’s imagine that this is an accurate reading of public reaction to the Times’ pricing, and that NYT executives wake up to realize that $4.99 is the monthly price that will bring in the greatest success all-around, in terms of dollars incoming and number of paying subscribers. The people already paying the exorbitant rate will all have to get refunds based on the new rate, I guess — or feel like dummies for paying so much in the first place.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to start with a (pretty standard-model) charter rate that was very low, then raise rates later? Odd.

‘We need this to survive!’ … zzzzz

Catching up on reading after my vacation, I spotted David Winer’s March 17 piece, “Comments on NYT paywall announcement,” and he makes a strong point that I’m 100% in agreement on: The Times’ pitch for people to begin paying for news online is that “We need this to survive.” … Fail!

So much better, Winer wrote (and again, 100% concurrence here), would be an offering of value to consumers. “Wouldn’t it have been wise to, at this juncture, offer something to sweeten the deal. Something truly exciting and new that you get when you pay the money. Something that makes your palms sweat and your heart beat faster?”

This supports my notion that premium memberships are a smarter idea for most news companies that want to bring in more revenue online. Currently, the Times is asking for people to pay for something that they’ve received free online for many years; that’s a difficult sale, when other quality news providers continue to be free. To compound it, the Times offers nothing new to “sweeten the deal.” … Fail.

False charge: I say news should be free

My last blog item got tweeted and shared quite a bit, and I spotted some pushback like this tweet: “NYTimes’ new pay model: They blew it!, or Why I want to bitch about paying for stuff on the internet (Via @steveouting)”

I need to push back on that one. In the case of NYT, I do think they can succeed by charging. As explained in my last post, I believe that a larger success will come from asking a much, much lower monthly fee; I suggested 99 cents for web-only full access to NYT content, and $1.99 for all-device access. As noted above, David Carr’s commenters indicate that $4.99 a month might be a price point that fills the NYT Co.’s bank account nicely.

No, I’m not bitching about paying for stuff on the Internet. I’m criticizing a pricing model that reflects an old-media view of doing business on the Internet and fails to address the realities of the Internet (one of them being that under-30ies are extremely unlikely to pay for NYT content online, so the debut price structure completely writes off younger readers; how smart is that?). If NYT execs followed my advice on the 99-cent/$1.99 pricing, they might still have a chance at the younger audience. Apparently they don’t care, which I find appalling. I guess the younger crowd can continue getting their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Oh, and Arianna Huffington.

Also, a high rate charged by ONE news provider damages the rest of the industry. If I as a typical consumer decide I love the Times so much that I’ll fork over $15, $20, or $35 every 4 weeks for access, I am extremely unlikely to add any other paid news sources that also demand payment, including my local newspaper website, should it charge. The more general-interest news sites that charge for access to non-premium content, the amount any one can attract will dwindle over time. There are too many quality news sources available online for site-specific charging to work over the long term among news websites.

Back to the premium-membership model: I think that for general-interest newspapers that are NOT the New York Times, free general-news content and a fee for premium “stuff” is the strongest option. What that stuff is I’ll address at a later date, after some research by a few of us at CU-Boulder is completed or at least further along.

Thanks, Lincoln, for the free NYT subscription

Finally, here’s another NYT-paywall development that has me scratching my head. Lincoln (the car brand) sent out e-mails to (I’m assuming) frequent-visiting NYTimes.com registered users, including me, offering a free NYT web + iPhone/smartphone account for the remainder of 2011. Yes, I accepted the offer; presumably I’ll be getting e-mails from Lincoln marketing a car I’ll never buy.

I don’t grok the logic of this, other than that Lincoln probably waved some nice cash in front of the Times. For those who pay $15/$20/$35 per 4 weeks, won’t they feel like chumps if they didn’t receive this offer and learn about it?

I don’t know NYT execs’ logic on this; perhaps they’ll let me know. Perhaps the e-mail went out to long-time registered NYTimes.com users. If that was the case, that would be a group of people long used to free access and difficult to transition into paying a high monthly fee. So this offer could be a way to ease them toward paying later on. … Perhaps the e-mail offers only went to older registered users — the target market for a brand like Lincoln. Though the problem with that is that older NYT readers are the most likely to pay a high monthly NYT subscription fee! … What’s your analysis of this move?

* at least on the smartphone platform

ConsumerReports.org is the classic example of a once-primarily print publisher having content valuable and unique enough that it can charge for it online. The site for years has had a subscription model, with a monthly or annual fee to access its product reviews.

I subscribed for a while, but I rarely needed to look for product reviews; I got tired of paying for a service that went unused most months and canceled. (The rate has changed since then: It’s now $26 a year, or $5.95 a month, auto-renewing.)

I’ve long been annoyed by ConsumerReports.org because it only offered subscriptions — no day passes or even a pass for a single month’s access without automatically dinging your credit card every month.

While CR’s regular website is still crippled in that way, the company’s new mobile website for smartphones finally offers a day pass for 99 cents, or a non-renewing month pass for $4.99. Hurray!

Hurray! CR finally offers better payment options

You have to wonder what took CR so long. Having CR reviews in your hand while out shopping for a new dryer is a handy thing, and I’d gladly pay for a daily or month pass during periods when I’m shopping for a major purchase.

So, CR, how about doing the same with your non-mobile website now? You can start getting customers like me — who refused to pay for a long-terms subscription — back. (Many years ago, I even subscribed to the print magazine.)

From a business perspective, I can understand why the one-off pricing for reviews or the day pass might seem to be an option to be avoided. Get enough people hooked into having their credit card charged automatically each month and that’s a sweet business model.

But the days when that was possible are gone, in my view. Too many websites and online services want to charge a monthly fee. Sorry, CR, but there are only so many monthly online fees I’m willing to pay.

I’ll use CR’s mobile website with the day pass option when I’m in a position to need the product reviews. I’ll avoid the regular website until it dumps the subscription-only silliness.

Recently, I’ve been noticing new iPhone apps coming to market that are adopting interesting business models. Generally, they can be categorized as using the “freemium” (or semi-freemium) model; i.e., they give away some valuable content and entice you to upgrade for more and better features.

1. This American Life iPhone app. … This app costs $2.99 to purchase, and what that gets you is well worth that small amount of money if you’re a fan of the public radio show (as I am):

• All of the This American Life radio broadcasts from the most current to the program’s beginning in 1995, which are streamed to your phone. (In other words, you need to be in range of a cell-phone tower or wi-fi network.)
• Easy search for old programs, including by contributor (e.g., David Sedaris, John Hodgman, et al).

The premium part of the model is if you would like to “own” any episode. You can download any program to your iPhone or iTouch (via Apple’s iTunes) for 99 cents, which you might want to do for a favorite episode to keep, or if you want to listen to several episodes on a car trip where you’re not likely to experience quality (or any) streaming.

This app is a great example of selling an app for a modest one-time fee, but also having a recurring revenue stream from the app. In this case, This American Life can make money from it’s 15-year archives with no work involved other than promoting the app to iPhone/iTouch owners.

2. Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2010 iPhone app. I only downloaded this app to my phone to look at the business model, not the female models. Swimsuit 2010 is a mobile version of the infamous SI annual Swimsuit issue of the magazine, featuring photos and videos.

This is a full-on freemium app, since it’s free to download to your iPhone/iTouch. That gets you only the basics: single swimsuit photos of several (but not all) SI models, and several 1-minute videos.

SI (and Apple) will get your money if you want more. (No, I did not pay for the upgrade.) For $1.99, paid from within the app, it is upgraded to see multiple photos of all the swimsuit models, and all the videos.

Which model (business, that is) should you choose: Free download with paid upgrade from within the app? Or paid download with much more given away free, but upgrades still sold within the app?

I think it depends on your audience. This American Life is a great radio program with a small but dedicated audience. SI’s controversial annual Swimsuit Issue is a mass-market offering worth $1 billion-plus in revenue for the publisher.

It’s in SI’s interest to get the limited app on as many phones as possible, and hope that lots of them will spring for the $1.99 upgrade. (A few days ago, the Swimsuit app was seeing a 7.8% paid-upgrade success rate.)

For This American Life, its loyal fans are more likely to pay the $2.99 both to show support for the program, and because what you get for that price is pretty darn nice for the show’s fans. (I didn’t hesitate to buy the app when I first saw it promoted.) I’m betting that the show will make more money by asking an up-front fee for the app than if it gave it away free and upsold the content.

For SI, I believe it will make more money giving away the sparse free app and selling upgrades than if it tried to charge an upfront fee for the app.

I’m not sure that we’ll ever know in these two cases, but I’d like to see some research on most-lucrative mobile app charging strategies for content. Indeed, I hope to be doing that at the Digital Media Test Kitchen at CU-Boulder before too long. (Hint, hint… need funding.)

Within reports of MediaNews Group about to institute a metered paywall at a couple of its newspapers by May is something disturbing. This excerpt is from a Bloomberg report about the newspaper chain’s plans:

“The newspapers, in York, Pennsylvania, and Chico, California, will give users free access to as many as 25 ‘premium’ articles monthly, after which they’ll have to pay an undetermined fee unless they subscribe to the print newspapers, said MediaNews President Joseph Lodovic. Premium content may include certain columns and investigative reporting, he said.

“’Most of our content will remain free,’ Lodovic said yesterday in an e-mail. ‘Once subscribed, the reader will have access to all premium across MediaNews Group.’”

I’ll buy the idea of calling investigative reporting “premium content”; it’s the most important journalism produced by most newspaper companies. But I take issue with adding “paid online” to that description.

So the Chico Enterprise-Record publishes a blockbuster investigative series uncovering, say, that private contractors are dumping waste into the lake that supplies most of the city’s water while city officials look the other way because they’ve been bribed. That’s a story you would want every person in Chico, and the state for that matter, to read.

But, no, you’ll have to pay for that if you’ve gone over your free web article quota.

I get it. MediaNews Group needs the money, would like more people to go back to paying for print editions, and is putting an online price tag on its best, “premium” content.

Really, I have no issue with news organizations charging for premium content or services, if they can figure out what they’ve got that’s not available elsewhere for free, a couple mouse-clicks away (which is a big if).

Unfortunately, lumping investigative journalism into the paywalled content pile is against the interests of the newspaper’s community.

How about if newspaper publishers decide to go with web paywalls (not my idea of a good strategy), they at least exempt investigative journalism in the interests of an informed citizenry?

So the long-awaited (well, at least by many of us media geeks) decision by NYTimes.com has been announced. And the winner is:

THE METERED PAYWALL!

According to the Times’ own report, by Richard Perez-Pena:

“Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.”

That doesn’t sound like the more nuanced approach to a metered paywall that I espoused on this blog yesterday. Then again, if it won’t be implemented till 2011 (!), there’s still time to create a system that’s less black-and-white and makes more sense.

Until I get a chance to quiz one of the Times execs on this decision, I’ll withhold judgment. Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks (to me) on the surface.

But there’s one quote in Perez-Pena’s piece that drives me up the wall. It’s from Janet Robinson, New York Times Co. president and CEO:

“There’s no prize for getting it quick. There’s more of a prize for getting it right.”

Sounds reasonable, you say? NO. … NYT has been studying this issue for a year; now it will take another year before finalizing and implementing the metered paywall. This is yet another demonstration of the newspaper industry’s conservative nature which has served it so poorly over the last decade and a half (since the first web browser was unleashed on the world).

Let’s see … one year. In the Internet age, the change that will likely occur on the technology scene — which will impact all media publishers profoundly — is probably going to be more than in what we saw in the entire decade or the 1970s or 1980s.

A big theme for 2010 in media will be mobile smart-phones and portable digital tablets; newspaper companies better have that figured out soon. (Perhaps NY Times Digital, with its large technology development staff, is well on its way.) But the Times is still mucking around with the details of its website metered-paywall decision and needs another year? Oy!

There are many things killing off the newspaper industry, and this is one of them. You’ve got to move faster, folks.

“New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers,” said NYMag.com’s Daily Intel in a Sunday report.

I’m not sure whether to believe the story or not, but since there’s no definitive word from NYT executives yet, let’s play along and pretend this is an accurate report: NYTimes.com this spring will launch a “metered” web payment system, where readers can sample X number of free articles before being asked to subscribe.

If that’s true and the system is as simple as that — “Dear loyal Times reader: You’ve read 10 articles for free this month; to read more, sign up for a paid subscription” — then it’s a bad decision. TechDirt minced no words with its story: “NY Times Apparently Planning To Commit Suicide Online With Paywall.”

Or go read Jeff Jarvis’ take on his BuzzMachine blog, where he states the obvious problem with the metered approach to web news content:

“They would would end up charging — and, they should fear, sending away — the readers who are worth the most while serving free those who are worth least. … Why charge your best customers? Why single them out? Why risk driving them away? The logic eludes me.”

But we’re talking about the most revered newspaper in the English-speaking world, and it’s not staffed by dummies. I would hope the Times leadership learned from the unsuccessful TimesSelect partial paid-wall experiment. The Times is a general-interest newspaper with a global reach and global influence; it would be foolish to turn away loyal online readers unwilling or unable to pay U.S. prices that aren’t realistic in some economies (e.g., India, the Middle East), not to mention invite other news organizations to take over their mantle as most influential news brand by not locking most of the world out.

I don’t know what decision NYT executives will announce, but if they go the metered paywall route, I can only hope that they get it right. While I continue to think that a voluntary membership model that gets paying members special privileges and commercial offers from advertisers is a better way to go, if metered paywall is the decision, then here’s what it should look like to have a chance of succeeding:

• Allow several free article views per day before a reader hits any kind of paywall. Ten articles per month and then a paywall, as the Financial Times’ website offers, is a non-starter for NYTimes.com and will result in unacceptable advertising losses for NYTimes.com as site traffic drops.
• This makes way more sense than the FT.com model, because for heavy users of NYTimes.com, they will see the paywall or alternative offer every day. FT.com users hit the paywall once per month at 10 articles, then most will not come back. FT.com can afford not to care, because it’s after business people who can afford to pay for FT’s specialized business and financial news coverage. It’s not after a massive audience the way NYTimes.com is (or should be).
• Give the NYTimes.com user who hits the “paywall” after, say, three or four stories in one day several options for continuing to read. Offering only the option of subscribing is, and I can’t think of a better word, dumb.
• What should the options be?
  1. Subscriptions for unfettered access, offered in various terms: monthly, 6-month, annual, lifetime, etc.
  2. A day-pass rate ($1 or $2?) for those wanting more but unwilling to commit to a subscription.
  3. Adjust the day-pass (and subscription rates) based on the country of the reader (determined by IP address). While a day pass to NYTimes.com might cost $1.50 to North American online readers, the price should be, say, the equivalent of 25 cents for readers in India where the standard wage is far less than in the U.S.
  4. Offer an alternative to paying for a day-pass: View a 30-second video commercial, which can’t be skipped or fast-forwarded, for a blockbuster ad or a targeted ad based on what the site knows about the reader. Or, assuming NYTimes.com has good targeting ability (possible with non-paying subscribers because the site makes everyone register), let the user take a market survey for an ad client who’s paying a premium; then give the reader a free day or week-long pass to unlimited articles.
  5. Offer the special membership I mentioned above as an option. This might cost more than a subscription, but would include extra goodies such as free or discount tickets to newsmaker events, and lucrative discount and free-offer deals from participating advertisers (e.g., two-for-one dinner or theater-ticket offers each month). The membership would also include unfettered access to the full website with no reading quotas.
  6. Offer something for those not willing to pay but who still want more. This might be a partial wall, where after viewing three NYT stories on one day, subsequent stories show only the first three or four paragraphs of a story — followed by the list of options above. I’d add even one more in this instance: a micropayment for, say, 25 cents to view the rest of the article (if it’s article No. 4 read by the user that day and they want to view the whole thing).
  7. Allow paying members of voluntary content-donation networks special access. Let’s say that I, a paying member to the Kachingle multi-website donation service, visit NYTimes.com and click its Kachingle medallion, indicating that I support NYTimes.com and some of my $5 a month paid to Kachingle gets proportioned every month to NYTimes.com based on my usage of the site. Perhaps for Kachingle member-supporters of NYTimes.com, the daily free-article limit becomes 10, or 20, rather than three, before the paywall and other options are shown.
  8. Establish some sort of convenient system for libraries and schools, so that users of public computers don’t run into annoying paywall barriers.
  9. Finally, use the paywall strategy for special events or promotions. For instance, right now the NYTimes.com metered wall could be set at three free articles, then the top offer for continued access to more full Times content for the next week is to make a $10 donation to Haiti earthquake relief, or a $5 donation for two days of full access.

In general, I’m against paywalls for general-news websites, for reasons that I and many other digital-media pundits have expressed many times over. But that’s a black-and-white view, and I think there are shades of gray that might work, as I’ve outlined above.

So … Dear Bill Keller and NYT executive team: Please don’t blow it with a restrictive metered paywall that will damage your brand’s influence and bottom line. If you’re dead set on the metered paywall model — and I still have hope that you’re not — then at least implement it intelligently.

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.

What’s wrong with this webpage I encountered the other day?

Besides the lack of wisdom of a general-interest newspaper (Newsday) putting a pay wall on its website for non-unique content (my opinion, shared by many other media experts), the worse part is that Newsday.com is leaving money behind. Double-dumb.

Here’s my experience:

1. I saw a Twitter post linking to this article; clicked through.
2. Got to Newsday.com teaser page with intro to story and a link to “VIDEO: See the Droid in action.”
3. Video seemed interesting, so I clicked.
4. Got to the page above, which gave me ONLY the options of subscribing (to the newspaper; to Optimum Online, a NY cable service; or to Newsday.com for $5 a week) in order to access the video.

Since I live in Colorado, I of course have no interest in any of those options. But if I could have paid 25 cents, or may 50, I might have done so to watch the video. Newsday.com ignores money from non-local online users who might be willing to pay a one-off fee.

In practice, I and most savvy online users probably would have clicked and searched a bit more to find a similar video about the new Droid phone elsewhere for free. But some percentage of people in my position would have paid rather than go through the hassle of searching elsewhere if there was a one-off payment option available. So Newsday.com leaves money on the table.

I believe that the kind of web pay-wall strategy that Newsday.com is deploying is certain to fail. It’s been done before by other newspaper websites in years past and it’s failed. But if the company is determined to lock down its news content, the least it could do is offer more options for viewing specific content.

Sometimes you just have to marvel at the inability of newspapers to grasp web publishing. Wow.

Tags: micropayments, newsday, paid content

So, it appears that we’ve passed the point within the newspaper industry of utter panic and all the publishers will not be colluding (ahem… I mean cooperating) to put most of their websites’ content behind pay walls. At least that CEO/publisher-group insanity is over — I hope.

Image: istockphoto.com

Instead, the meme within the industry is something I’ve long supported: Let’s keep most of our news content online free, so that we don’t lose advertisers and high reader numbers, and maintain our “googlejuice,” but let’s create more “premium” content and services that we can charge for … and people will find worthy of paying.

But what is this premium content that newspaper companies can produce for the web (and mobile devices) that will get online users spending?

This is a difficult question, with so much great information and news available elsewhere on the web for free. And then there’s the little matter of many newspaper staffs having been cut so much in the last couple years. Who’s going to produce this high-value content?

I’d like to use this blog item as a starting point for a discussion about what newspapers can create that they can sell. Please use the comments feature to share your ideas!

I’ll get things started with a comment of my own. It should be first in the list unless someone beats me to it…