Slashdot Mirror
The Fate of The Free Newspaper
jm92956n writes "We've all become accustomed to the wide availability of newspapers and other media online, almost all of which is available for free. Today, however, The New York Times (free registration required; how ironic!) is running an article that questions the long term viability of that business model. Interestingly, the Times now has more online readers than print readers. Is the era of free news content about to end?"
But when it comes to online news, they are happy to read it but loath to pay for it.
1). We're already used to it being free
2.) The payment barrier still sucks, i.e.: No valid micropayment system exists (STILL) and people who read their news ont he web generally don't want a subscription to every resource they use. If there were a reasonable micropayment system in place, where content poroviders could charge you a few cents to read an article or access certian content, without hassle to the end-user, this type of thing could work.
How do you get a critical mass using a micropayment system? I'm not touching that one. If I had an answer, I'd already be at 5.) Profit!
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
>> Is the era of free news content about to end?
Paypal me $1 for the answer.
What about people who read the paper on the train or bus? I have no desire to get my laptop out or have to read articles on a tiny mobile phone screen just to get my dose of news in a morning. I think newspapers in print will be a round a while yet, just to serve the needs of the communter. I couldn't survive my journey into Manchester without the Metro, and the letters page is always hilarious!
Are you saying that having no source of revenue is a poor buisness model? Whell now you tell me, thats just great.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
You can't beat the good old BBC. They even have pages in many different languages. And because they don't rely on advertising, they don't have to suckle on the corporate teat. Get your (pretty much) unbaised news here.
Get your own free personal location tracker
As long as paper is cheaper than video screens there will be free papers. Case in point, Washing, DC just gained a new free daily The Washington Examiner in the last month, and within the last two year the Washington Post launched its own freebie paper, The Express.
They both seem to have viable business models and in fact the Express has already decimated small group of targetted suburban papers that had cost $.35 which have now either gone out print, or or free depending on the suburban county each served. And the Post is finding that its free paper is doing better than it is. Though I think that growth will slow because of the Examiner which seems closer to a real newspaers (if one only on par to the NY Post or NY News) than the Express which consists entirely of heavily cropped wire stories. The Examiner at least has unique features and few of its own writers - plus it runs in depth wire stories, especially in SPORTS - which with the launch of the Washington Nationals should 'sell' a lot of free papers.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
Every time someone is trying to charge for a service on the internet, another provider will emerge and offer it for free. That free service will inevitably will be viewed more and gain credibility.
It's the same story. Nothing to see here, move along!
The amount you pay for a daily newspaper does not even cover the printing and distribution costs. All money made by the paper (and the majority of production costs) is covered by advertising-- print ads and classifieds. The $.25 or $.50 you pay barely covers the paper and ink.
:-)
Web distribution is negligible on daily per-person basis.
The problem here is the failure of online advertising. Somehow during the dotcom boom "per click" payment became the obsession. It seems on the web "branding" or "product awareness" is no longer valuable. There's no perfectly quantifiable way to tell if these sort of ads work in newspapers or television, but if they're not getting the clicks they want, the advertisers say "web advertising doesn't work!!"
I think the obvious answer to this is local data, such as google local. Using your ip address to find your locality and serving up neighborhood ads is the only way for this business model to work-- not just advertising pizza hut, but putting pizza hut's local numbers in the ads you see will help.
But you guys can't have it both ways-- if you block the ads through your browser or your host list, you can't expect free content forever. That's why i don't use anything (other than a popup blocker, of course) to prohibit ads. They are what allow us to consume "free" content.
Remember that next time you block one of these guys. Or go ahead and pay for that content. Slashdot's business model should lead the way!
That's odd; the New York Times just bought half of the Boston Metro, a freely distributed paper.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Tip: For added camouflage, poke little 'eye' holes through one side and be rendered practically invisible!
The newspapers adopt an Oracle-like pricing model for advertisers (since billions of people CAN see your ad online, we'll charge you $$$ for it to appear there) which hurts them. Their real problem is that newspaper management are old-school newpaper guys who think in terms of the circulation of folded 11x19 sheets.
That's BS. Papers are advertising-delivery mechanisms, always have been.
If the papers actually thought about finding ways of putting their "real" paper advertisements (ie. NOT click-thrus) in the online edition, they'd have more effective advertising.
Alot of people actually pay for papers just for the ads. I often buy the Sunday paper just for the supermarket flyers and department store ads.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
What's the allure to the consumer of a "paper" paper? With an online newspaper, I can browse at work, for free, without getting ink on my hands.
The weight. The portability. The convenience. Yeah, I can pop open my laptop in bed, or at the kitchen table, but the physical paper is much easier to carry around from bed to kitchen. When on the subway, it's impossible to pop open a laptop to read the news. On the commuter train, you can use a laptop, but with the crowded seats the paper is still more convenient. During lunch if it's nice out I'll head to the park, maybe bring the paper with me. The actual paper is so much easier to carry around and to read than a full sized laptop. No, PDAs just don't work for reading news.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Yeah, but it would look weird to carry your computer with you to read in the bathroom (I swear, that's the best reading seat in the whole house!!!).. :)
If I see a really interesting article, I'll probably want my friends to see it too; either by emailing it or blogging about it.
A subscription-only site has less value to me since I can't spread the news around. Even if I subscribe to a micropayments scheme, my friends probably don't.
If you close content off from the public, you reduce the value of that content. A subscription site might have great content, but most people will never know about it because no-one else is linking too it.
>I assure you the BBC is biased.
I am not sure that "unbiased" in a possibility. Any reporting always puts a slant on things.
>Most news in the U.S. skews to the left.
I am not sure that "most" is that meaningful, but it depends on where you compare to. My experience on US news is that it is fairly right wing. But this, in turn, is just reflective of US society, which is to the right on my own country (the UK). However, most of the national media outlets are on the coasts, which tend to be the most left wing parts of the US. So compared to the US population as a whole, it probably is slightly left slanted.
Incidentally, the Marxist assumption would not be that "owned by someone means conservative". It would be that because a news source is owned by someone, it will generally operate to the benefit of the owner, rather than society at large, whether that is conservative or otherwise. This is, I think, probably fair. The BBC has it's bias as well, but at least this is different from the prevailing news media, which is no bad thing.
Phil
- Ad-Supported Model: Consumers get the content for free as long as they are willing to watch & click-through enough ads. Sucks because people hate/block/avoid ads (insufficient revenues), although Google might make this work.
- BBC Model: An annual government tax on PCs is used to fund a quasi-independent news gathering organization. Sucks because it adds a tax, will never happen in the U.S. (due to freedom of the press and government non-compete issues), but it could happen in the UK.
- a la Carte Model: Every content creator charges their own subcription. Sucks if you want to read more than one source.
- Flat-Rate Integrator Model: A subscriber pays a monthly subscription for all the news/content aggregated by a given company (AOL, Yahoo, Google?). Sucks because snooty brand-conscious content providers (NYT, WSJ, etc.) will never join an aggregator -- they will prefer to force people to pay separate subscriptions for separate content sources.
- Micopayment Model: A subscriber pays-per-view, the charge showing up on their monthly ISP/cellphone/credit card bill. Sucks because the cost of admin and dealing with disputed charges wipes out most of the revenues. Sucks because people hate being nickled and dimed to death.
I guess we will see which sucky model gets adopted. I suspect they all will with ad-supported and a la carte being more common than the others.Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Online news outlets have had problems supporting themselves with ad revenues (as the paper editions have always done), but that's largely their own fault. Nobody ever expects that readers will throw down the print edition of a newspaper and run off to respond to an ad, but that's exactly what advertisers seem to expect with Web ads. So, they've made them increasingly intrusive and obnoxious, insisting that everyone take notice regardless of interest or relevance. So, the public responded with ad-blocking. If ads in the print version slapped me in the face every time I opened the paper, I'd stop reading it (or at least wear a face mask) too...
he weight. The portability. The convenience.
Exactly. Not to mention the other uses.
Have you ever used a laptop to line a bird cage? The keys get sticky.
Or house train a dog? You can really injure a puppy if you discipline it using the online version of NYT on your full-tower box.
Although some laptops seem to run hot enough to start fires, using a "paper" newspaper is a much better idea for a fireplace.
Paper gives you much better blanket coverage when sleeping on the subway. Chances are that if a bum has a laptop, he won't be needing to sleep on the subway anyway. It's also much harder to discreetly spy/follow somebody on the street if you're trying to walk around holding a laptop in front of your face.
Paper newspapers will never go away.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
According to the article they have more-or-less had about 1.1 million print readers since 1993.
All I see is a greater circulation now that they have an extra 1.4 million online readers.
Nowhere do I see them saying they have LOST print subscribers.
The weight of assumption is too great to claim that those online readers would have otherwise bought the print version - just like assuming people who downloaded free albums from Napster would have bought the CD.
Bottom line = this is 100% additional exposure for NYT, and perhaps other papers like it.
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
I'm surprised that we haven't yet seen any DHTML techniques that counter ad blocking. I envision Alice clicking on a story and getting only the first paragraph because she has blocked the ads from that site while Bob gets the whole story because an ad that he is not blocking is rewriting the DOM to display or download the rest of the story. I think that coupled with a server side counter of the number of times the ad was actually displayed might be the basis for a better ad revenue model than pay per click.
I think innerHTML, HttpXmlRequest, and so on would be available on any browser with ad blocking capability. I think with something like this, and the user ability to turn ad blocking on and off by web site, we'd end up with marketplace forces determining what is acceptable in advertising.