Posts Tagged ‘Newspapers’

Micro-Syndication

Friday, July 16th, 2010

After reading Geoffrey Graybeal & James Hayes’ paper, All The News That’s Fit To Pay For Online:The Case for a Modified News Micropayment Model on the Social Web, a concept was spawned here at Carrot. Graybeal & Hayes outlined a sharing based rewards system (what they call microearn) that would be a pivotal aspect for any paid online news content model to succeed and thus Micro-Syndication was born. The authors of this paper laid the foundation for the concept and we put our brains together to make it happen.

Today’s web culture is all about personalization, social interaction, and sharing. People are constantly posting links on their social media pages, sending information, articles, or music to friends, and so on. Of course the vast majority of this is free content and even when it is payment protected the person sending the link is getting nothing out of it other than the satisfaction they may provide their friends. In fact many people rely on the advice of a certain friend for much of their news, always checking their friend’s profile to see what links he has posted. We call these sharers, sifters, because they read through news content, discarding the unimportant or not so great, finally choosing the best stories to share with their friends. Sure everyone shares articles when they’re free, but when charging for news content, who’s to say these sifters will continue to share pay walled content with their friends?

So when charging for news content online, why not provide financial reward for those who share the link to one of your articles? Sifters could earn a commission off of their referrals. For example sifters could receive a referral reward of $0.01 every time someone they refer buys a $0.12 article. Surely such a tactic would cause revenues to steeply climb as it increases the news publisher’s sales staff drastically. Now essentially anyone can become a paid promoter for a news site and all of its stories.

Here is a brief very non-technical look at how Micro-Syndication works:

A Micro-Syndication button is added to all of an online news provider’s pay wall protected articles. A sifter comes along and pays to read an article. If the sifter chooses to share the article they simply click the Micro-Syndication button which prompts a new page or pop-up on the news publisher’s site. The sifter enters their CarrotPay Merchant ID and optionally their name, email, etc. The site will then return a customized link or file for distribution. Each time someone clicks through using the sifter’s link or file to purchase an article, a percentage of the sale goes directly to the sifter’s CarrotPay account as CarrotPay Buy Buttons can easily facilitate split payments.

The beauty of Micro-Syndication is that it can be used not only for news articles, but for any shared online content. Websites could use Micro-Syndication to promote any type of product (music, images, games, etc.). It is very easy to do, provides incentive for people to promote your goods, and sharing is already a very common practice that internet users are in the habit of doing.

So what do you think, is this a model that could work? Would you become a sifter and use Micro-Syndication? Let us know your thoughts.

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Extra, Extra! Pay To Read All About It?!?

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

There has been a lot of buzz lately surrounding the fact that most online news content providers such as The Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times are charging users to view their articles, with the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and many others poised to follow suit in the near future. The subject of charging for online content has stirred up some mixed emotions and has created many skeptics who are irate over this turn of events.

We can argue until we are blue in the face whether it is right or wrong to charge for news content online. We can also argue whether it will even work, whether people are willing to pay to read their news online. But in the end it is inevitably going to happen because after years of losses it is proven that news content providers simply cannot run a sustainable business online without charging readers a fee. So that leaves us with the dilemma concerning what type of payment platform is best suited for users and online news providers.

When discussing the alternative methods of charging for online news content, three different methods seem to emerge. There are those who argue that a subscription model (of a day, month, or year) is the way to go. There are others that say a time metered rate is the best alternative. And finally there are those who argue that a pay-per-article payment platform would work best. Of course it is difficult to say which is in fact best as it is not that cut and dry, however I will weigh the pros and cons of each method to get an idea of each platform’s positives and negatives.

Subscription based models seem to be the most commonly adopted which is not all that surprising. Print newspaper sales have always been primarily subscription based so why change for the online news? It is not a complicated platform and readers are comfortable and very used to this form of payment for news content. News content providers have the opportunity to offer a variety of subscription models such as daily, monthly, or yearly. For one single fee, readers can enjoy unlimited access to everything the online news provider has to offer.

This brings up an interesting point though. Is anyone truly interested in everything an online news provider has to offer? Does anyone read every single article, look through all of the classifieds, and complete every puzzle? Don’t most people buy the paper to read certain sections (Business, Sports, Fashion, etc.) or even specific articles?

Then what about a time based fee where readers gain unlimited access of online news content for a limited time? This way readers can pick and choose the articles they want to read and granted they don’t read at a snail’s pace, would get more bang for their buck than using a subscription based model. The idea behind a rate per minute (or 5 min, 10 min, etc.) is that users will efficiently read only those articles that interest them.

However, there seems to be a few problems with a time based payment platform. For one, it takes the enjoyment out of leisurely reading and browsing, turning reading the news into more of a task related focus on retrieving as much pertinent and valuable information as one can as quickly as possible. Not to mention such a payment platform would certainly deter slower readers. I could see a plethora of other headaches arising such as readers who forget to sign out leaving their clocks running for hours and their rates soaring with a continuing variable cost. On the other hand what about readers who don’t even finish one article in a fixed time platform because they had to run off to do something else for five minutes?

Finally we have the per-article payment platform, where users can read the first paragraph of an article, but have to pay a small fee to read the whole thing. Using this method readers have time to pick and choose the articles they are interested in reading and can pay to read each specific article at their convenience. Readers can cheaply purchase a few articles that caught their eye. Many readers only buy a newspaper or magazine to read certain articles or sections anyway.

But what if you are the kind of reader that enjoys reading all of the news “cover to cover”? This type of payment platform is simply not the most cost effective way for such a reader to peruse all of the articles. Also the payment system would have to be easy for the reader to complete as it could get annoying to fill out lengthy forms each visit just to pay $0.20 to read a couple articles.

Each payment platform has its fair share of benefits and downfalls. Also, each online news source is unique therefore different payment platforms may be right for different sites. Perhaps the best payment platform for an online news content provider to adopt is a hybrid or mixture of two or all three of these methods.

So I pose the question to you, which online news content payment platform is the best? Did I miss any? Let us know what you think is the right payment platform for online news content providers to adopt.

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Information wants to be free! – Part 3

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

The Internet is the world’s largest library. It’s just that all the books are on the floor. John Allen Paulos¹

Some further quotes from Ken Doctor’s excellent book Newsonomics:

Page 19 – Though the web allows us to be our own editors, the truth is most of us like the opinion and judgement of others – editors in the old parlance.

Page 79 – The reading revolution is not a rejection of newspaper content. The newspaper is simply an anachronism. Why would you cut down all those trees, put gas in a truck to deliver the papers, and then have to settle for old news, when you can transport yourself to any news or opinion source on the globe at the click of a mouse.

Many consumers of news and commentary get their news and analysis from a combination of newspapers, magazines and websites, generally using the internet to keep up to date with events and print for analysis and commentary. As mentioned in Part 2 the newspaper industry naively believed that advertising would pay for the production of their content and that this would enable them to offer the same content as the print version, but free of charge. The reality has turned out to be very different.

Although advertising revenue will form part of the solution, publishers are experimenting with various models of charging for content by erecting pay-walls with customers paying a monthly subscription to access the content on the site. The most successful applications to date appear to be FT.com (which at the time of writing allows customers to see a small number of articles, after which they need to pay a subscription to see further content) and the Wall St Journal. Both these publications are however producing content which is valuable to the people chosing to read it (Information wants to be expensive because it is so valuable).

The conundrum facing publishers who want to charge for content is that the erection of paywalls can trigger a decline in the number of visitors to the site with a consequential fall off in advertising revenue. The revenue from subscriptions therefore needs to be greater than any potential loss in advertisng revenue if this approach is to succeed.

Other methods of charging for content are also being considered now that small payments can be processed both inexpensively and with zero friction ( ie no data entry and one click to authorise payment ).  With the ability to process micropayments as low as 1 cent or 1 penny, publishers are now seriously looking at charging for content in the following ways>

1. A day pass – This would allow unlimited access to the site for a 24 hour period with readers paying say 50 cents to a 1$.

2. Metered usage – readers pay for the time on the site at say 2p for 5 minutes with 1 hour costing 24p.

3. Pay per article – readers get a preview of an article and decide whether they want to read the whole article or not for which they have to pay, say 5p etc.

Finishing up with a couple of quotes 1 from Newsonomics:

Page 82 – There is no iTunes for news, and when it comes, it almost certainly won’t be the newspapers and broadcasters themselves who bring it to us.

and the 2nd from the blogsite “thatColumn@blogspot.com” – A Jeremy Clarkson inspired rant at the new Times and Sunday Times paywalls

……let me spend on a per-article (repeat-read allowed once paid) basis, and I’ll join tomorrow. So not till you institute micropayments.

¹ John Allen Paulos is a professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia who has gained fame as a writer and speaker on mathematics.

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Information wants to be free ! – Part 2

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing – Albert Einstein

Following is a selection of quotes from a book titled “Newsonomics – 12 New trends that will shape the news you get” written by Ken Doctor¹ and published earlier this year.

Page 1 – We are getting less news. There are simply far fewer bringing it to us. Many stories are never covered. There are simply fewer reporters available to cover them.

Page 5 – In this new era, we will end up getting the journalism that we as a society and individuals pay for.

Page 7 – The Internet age has given readers and journalists alike unbelievable new tools to produce and distribute the news, and to read it anywhere and everywhere, and from the greatest diversity of sources imaginable. that promises remains, even as a mundane, but fundamental, question persists: Who is going to pay for the creation of high quality news ?

The process of finding a solution to the problem of how we pay for the creation of quality news is moving on to the next phase now that it has become obvious that advertising is not the complete solution and publsihers have decelared war on news aggregators. Some of the news sites are able to generate a reasonable amount of advertising revenue but not sufficient to cover the costs of the journalists required to create the content. There are a number of reasons why advertising can never be the complete solution:

1. Prior to the internet the number of publication and places for print advertising was relatively finite, whereas the number on the internet is almost infinite. A reduced advertising spend is being spread over a greater number of possible sites

2. It is now much easier to target advertising more effectively and measure that effectivness with the result that advertisers are much more selective about where and when they advertise. To quote Ken Doctor again

Page 82: There used to be a clichéd joke about ad spending among advertisers: ” I know one half of my advertising spend is wasted. I just don’t know which half.” It has been replaced with one that is chilling to those selling to an indifferentiated mass of eyeballs; ” Actually it turns out that 80% of my advertising budget is being wasted and now, finally, I know exactly which 80% that is.“

Publishers need to find ways of bridging this revenue gap whilst dealing with the issues of news aggregators, sites such as the BBC which do not have the same revenue concerns and what happens to traffic and advertising revenues should paywalls be erected.

¹Ken Doctor is a news industry analyst and is an analyst for the research firm Outsell.

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Information wants to be Free ! – Part 1

Monday, June 21st, 2010

“Information wants to be free” – How often is this quotation rolled out to back up the position taken by those who maintain that all news, information, commentary, anlaysis etc should be free. Unsurprisingly this quote is invariably taken out of context. The expression is first recorded as pronounced by Stewart Brand¹ at the first Hackers Conference² in 1984, in the following context:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting each other.”

There has been much debate over the years about whether news, commentary and analysis can and should be charged for. Initially it looked as though advertising would ride to the rescue but the revenues from advertising have far from compensated for the cataclysmic drop in advertising revenues which has hit many newspapers, in particular those local papers in the US which were very much dependent on classifieds. The temperature of the debate was raised in 2009 when News Corp effectively accused the news-aggregating-sites of profiting from their and other publishers’ content by taking this content for free. They then announced that they were looking at ways of charging for their content and that much of it would be going behind pay walls. The news-aggregating-sites countered that the publishers needed them just as much, as they were directing traffic to the newspapers sites.

No one can argue that those who are creating comment and analysis need to be paid for their endeavours. Advertising will undoubtedly form part of the solution as will some methods of paying for content. Micropayments will form part of this evolving payment landscape.

To finish up with a quote from a post by Stuart Cosgrove on the 38minutes.co.uk blog:

“Many global media jihadists argued – often in the face of commercial logic – that free was the new black and that one day everything would be free. The theory was that anyone who tried to erect a pay-wall would suffer and that the new democracy of the web was too pervasive to turn back the clock.

I’m less sure. I think a big challenge looms and that pay-walls will follow in all sorts of territories on the web.

Many people are now used to a micro-payment online culture that the era of ‘ecommerce media’ may be just around the corner.”

¹ Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog

² The Hackers Conference is an annual invitation-only gathering of designers, engineers and programmers to discuss the latest developments and innovations in the computer industry.

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