Mike Arauz is a strategist at (Special Guest Post) To Read this Post, Please Pay Ten Cents
(This is a guest post by Bud Caddell. Bud and I work together at Undercurrent. We'll be at SXSW in March. Find us on Twitter - @bud_caddell and @mikearauz - and say hi.)
I’m on this kick of late to guest post for blogs across the web. I only ask that those blog owners ask me an interesting question or give me a deep thought for pondering. Mike asked me how to save the New York Times. Great question, Mike. First off, did you know I’ve never actually bought a newspaper?
Pick one or the other
Today, I have the great fortune to live in a city with a prestigious paper, the New York Times. But when I was going to college and living in Austin, we had the Austin American-Statesman – potentially the worst newspaper in America. But even with the NY Times on every street corner, I’m just not interested in news printed on paper. What do I do with all that paper when I’m done? What if the ink gets all smudgy? And I have no talent whatsoever in folding the paper as I read it; that’s a learned skill.
Besides, Mike, lots of people more concerned with this whole debate have sounded off already. It seems like the current meme is around micropayments, paying a few pennies for a story instead of a couple bucks for the whole thing. That sounds a little bit like begging to me. Please won’t you pay me anything for this news?
Regarding micropayments, Clay Shrirky said, “Such systems solve no problem the user has, and offer no service we want.”
Maybe you could replace some of those news stands here in Manhattan with wifi emitting kiosks that let commuters grab a quick update to their NYTimes mobile app for ten cents. Maybe that works for a place like Manhattan (and almost nowhere else in the country), but that’s trading analog dollars for digital pennies. And that’s the crux of all these discussions. News outlets are finding themselves in familiar territory to the music industry of the 90’s. Need a physical CD? You’ve only got so many options. Need a song on your computer? That’s easy. And it’s spreadable. Ruh-roh.
Thar’s no gold in them thar hills, anymore. That’s how gold rushes work. Print news made money when news was more scarce and people had few options to sell their junk, post job listings, and do everything else Classifieds used to do. In this type of decline, dollars become pennies.
In the most pragmatic op-ed I’ve read, Michael Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate (a site that actually tried charging for online content), said of the glut of online news outlets, “This competition, and not some kind of petulance or laziness or addled philosophy, is what keeps readers from shelling out for news.”
Pricing models like micro-payments could inject some novelty into the market, but novelty ultimately wears off. Why not reduce distribution then? Wherever I go in this city, I see stacks of the NY Times sitting out to rot. Make printed news more scarce, force your fans to opt-in to home delivery (and paying more often). Try anything, but it’s sure to wear off in the long term.
Digital content will always struggle to be free. It’s the classic line from Jurassic Park, “life finds a way”... content finds a way outside of your pricing model. Content itself is not a sustainable business model on the web. Period. Your readers are your business model. Learn more about what they want and why they have the affinity for your paper that they do. There are no new solutions to old problems left to monetize. What’s the new problem? Concentrate there, not on micro-fixes.
I’m on this kick of late to guest post for blogs across the web. I only ask that those blog owners ask me an interesting question or give me a deep thought for pondering. Mike asked me how to save the New York Times. Great question, Mike. First off, did you know I’ve never actually bought a newspaper?
Pick one or the other
Today, I have the great fortune to live in a city with a prestigious paper, the New York Times. But when I was going to college and living in Austin, we had the Austin American-Statesman – potentially the worst newspaper in America. But even with the NY Times on every street corner, I’m just not interested in news printed on paper. What do I do with all that paper when I’m done? What if the ink gets all smudgy? And I have no talent whatsoever in folding the paper as I read it; that’s a learned skill.
Besides, Mike, lots of people more concerned with this whole debate have sounded off already. It seems like the current meme is around micropayments, paying a few pennies for a story instead of a couple bucks for the whole thing. That sounds a little bit like begging to me. Please won’t you pay me anything for this news?
Regarding micropayments, Clay Shrirky said, “Such systems solve no problem the user has, and offer no service we want.”
Maybe you could replace some of those news stands here in Manhattan with wifi emitting kiosks that let commuters grab a quick update to their NYTimes mobile app for ten cents. Maybe that works for a place like Manhattan (and almost nowhere else in the country), but that’s trading analog dollars for digital pennies. And that’s the crux of all these discussions. News outlets are finding themselves in familiar territory to the music industry of the 90’s. Need a physical CD? You’ve only got so many options. Need a song on your computer? That’s easy. And it’s spreadable. Ruh-roh.
Thar’s no gold in them thar hills, anymore. That’s how gold rushes work. Print news made money when news was more scarce and people had few options to sell their junk, post job listings, and do everything else Classifieds used to do. In this type of decline, dollars become pennies.
In the most pragmatic op-ed I’ve read, Michael Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate (a site that actually tried charging for online content), said of the glut of online news outlets, “This competition, and not some kind of petulance or laziness or addled philosophy, is what keeps readers from shelling out for news.”
Pricing models like micro-payments could inject some novelty into the market, but novelty ultimately wears off. Why not reduce distribution then? Wherever I go in this city, I see stacks of the NY Times sitting out to rot. Make printed news more scarce, force your fans to opt-in to home delivery (and paying more often). Try anything, but it’s sure to wear off in the long term.
Digital content will always struggle to be free. It’s the classic line from Jurassic Park, “life finds a way”... content finds a way outside of your pricing model. Content itself is not a sustainable business model on the web. Period. Your readers are your business model. Learn more about what they want and why they have the affinity for your paper that they do. There are no new solutions to old problems left to monetize. What’s the new problem? Concentrate there, not on micro-fixes.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
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2 Comments:
The Times has been getting outside press recently for its embrace of multimedia on the site, and staffing up on some young digitals. They've always been known for (some of) their exclusive content. So maybe they - and other papers - leave the redundant International, National, and Local news to those who, in the future, specialize in that, while they stick to their own exclusive content only. It won't solve the whole problem but it's a start.
Bud,
A nicely constructed and posited argument against many of the proposed models to save the Times. But is this about saving the Times or the seemingly torturous death thralls of the newspaper industry?
The NYTimes has a very different problem than the one you've posed here. Their problem is that the interwebs have hijacked their ad revenue, that Craigslist has usurped their classifieds, that 'people' have beaten them to breaking news. The very NEWSPAPER model as it has been defined has all but disappeared.
Content, however, still remains valuable, regardless of media or channel.
People do and will continue to pay for content on the web...the web, and content in a digital format, is just another delivery mechanism. Another channel.
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