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Paid Online News Venture Fails To Get Subscribers
Ian Lamont writes "The idea of migrating people from free online news content to paid subscriptions has been dealt a blow. A venture meant to fill the void left by the print Rocky Mountain Times has attracted 3,000 subscribers — just 6% of its original goal of reaching 50,000 paid subscribers by Thursday. InDenverTimes.com is currently free, but the plan was to have gated premium content starting next month for a $5/month subscription. The project has entrepreneurial backing and articles from journalists who used to work for the print-focused Rocky Mountain News, which closed last month. However, a lack of paying subscribers and low online ad rates means that the venture might have to scale back its ambitions."
It was the Rocky Mountain News that shut down...
I am just going to leave this here. Clicky
It's been almost a law of Internet content for a while. If you charge for content and lock it down, you can make some money here and there, but almost all the time you'll make more overall if you don't charge, attract way, way more readers, and sell ads. Of course, making "more" doesn't mean you'll be making "much", but so it goes.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Hmm, Oxygen bar anyone? How about bottled water? Selling stuff that has been free in the past can pay off.
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Surprise, surprise.
You mean people won't pay for something they can just as easily get for free?
Really, who didn't see this one coming?
What value are they adding to the "news" when, between the TV news websites and Google News for all the other locals who are NOT participating in this doomed venture, people get what they want?
The only way this could work is if EVERY relevant news outlet decided to do this simultaneously. It would only take ONE outlet not participating to ruin the model.
These guys need to realize that they need to give up on a dead and dying model of how information is distributed. The old media moguls who still run the show don't get it. That they can't up with another solution speaks to their actual lack of vision and creativity. Hey, Murdoch, if you're so fucking smart, why can't you and your people come up with a product that people want to buy?
If you can't link directly to it - it's pointless; if you can direct link - why pay for it?
Eventually the over-valuation of old media forms will rebalance to make web-ads more viable.. then "more" could be "much".. question though is when?
...because... DUH!
Most of the stuff on
50,000 subscribers in a month? That's really, really optimistic.
It sounds to me like that's the goal they set in order to meet some certain existing financial mark (such as paying the current rent and 100% of the reporter's salaries, etc.) Not a safe bet on a real unknown like "who will subscribe to the online version?"
John
I should pay for news when I can find it anywhere I want for free? If 'content' is going to be premium, it needs to be something that I can't find anywhere else. The general problem for these news sites is you can find it somewhere else.
Om, nomnomnom...
The idea that you are going to win charging money when there exists an Internet a few billion strong that is devoted to passing and spreading information for basically nothing is on its face silly. Short of government mandate creating a cartel, basic news is going to be impossible to charge for.
The only people that can charge are folks who actually do investigative journalism and can bring something to the table that others can't. The Economist is a great of a publication that has actually managed to charge people. They manage to bring in heavy weight thinkers (Nobel laureates, high government officials, authors, etc.) that normally are harder to access. They serve their niche well and drag in a few extra bucks from the Intertubes for the effort.
What you can't charge for is basic news and random journalist opinion. The opinion of a journalist (no offense) is not any deeper or brighter than any other bloke. You might as well ask a hair dresser or an engineer for their opinion. Basic news is also impossible to charge for. News spreads too fast and someone will put it up for free.
If you serve a niche very very well in a way that absolutely no one else does credibly, you might be able to charge for access. Otherwise though, the only other alternative is to find a way to turn eyeballs on the page into cash. Usually, that means ads, but there are certainly other ways out there that no one has hit on yet. I mean hell, who would have thought 20 years ago that the print cartoonist who do the best are not actually in print, but on the web and make most of their money by selling merchandise?
...Just don't know when to quit....
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
I live in Denver and always preferred the Rocky Mountain News to the Denver Post, the local paper that has so far survived. I'm a news junkie and get all my content almost exclusively online. I never heard of InDenverTimes.com until this morning.
While the summary's conclusion may be correct — migration from print to web may very well be a futile endeavor — it's an entirely different story if people in the target demographic know nothing of the venture. Let's at least acknowledge this for what it is: in large part, a failure of publicity.
I also had not heard of it at all, and I live in Denver also...
Although once in the web arena, I'm not sure how well a newspaper based web site can do against the news station web sites.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's not solely the fact that we can get the same thing elsewhere for free that did them in... It's also the fact that, in the new age of Internet-powered media which we're just starting to see dawn now, no one really should have to pay for anything.
If the Omaha World-Herald were to shut down tomorrow, I'd still get all the local news I need from KETV, WOWT, KMTV, or KPTM. And if the TV stations set up a subscription model on their respective websites, I'd still be able to watch the 6 o'clock news for free over the air. In fact, it might prompt them to add more local news programming to take up the slack. There would be no incentive for me to pay a dime for local news when I can get it for free.
in years. They are no different than phone books now.
Theres a reason I have to call the newspaper and bitch at them to stop throwing the fucking useless pulp on my driveway every morning. It took me threatening to start calling the cops and reporting them as littering before the stopped. I have never subscribed to a newspaper in this state, and haven't paid for a newspaper in at least 20 years.
Subscriptions fees are just icing on the cake, free money so to speak. They make their real money on advertising in the newspaper. The value of their advertising to their real customers (the advertisers) is high subscription counts.
An advertiser wants to hit as many people as possible for the least amount of cost.
So because of that bullshit, I get a newspaper every day that I don't want and at best gets used to start a fire in the fireplace. Most of the time it goes in the trash. If I'm really lucky I'll get to throw it in the trash before it gets soaking wet and ran over when I back out of the driveway.
It doesn't matter if I read it or not, they can claim that their shitty little waste of trees and landfill space has one more viewer because they dropped it off.
Only idiots pay for newspaper subscriptions because EVERY news source now spews ads at you all the time. If people are given the choice of paying AND seeing ads, or just seeing the ads, which do you think they are going to pick? With a few minor exceptions from older generations people don't even prefer the dead tree format anymore, it was great during its time, but now that we can search and quickly access stories we want via the web, newspapers are dead in their current form.
Once they realize this, they might have a chance at surviving. Its unlikely however since greed will likely do them in anyway, with the Internet its far too easy for someone else to come along and start a new news service with less ads and no cost to the viewer. Bandwidth is dirt cheap. Sensationalism is annoying. Typical reporters are generally so biased they can't see straight. People have realized that if they are going to get all this crappy news anyway, might as well just go read some douchebags blog. Its probably not been researched or fact checked, but considering the quality of what the major news outlets are producing its really not any different, except there is no expectation of quality news so people filter it anyway.
Traditional media (print, tv, radio, whatever) doesn't consider its viewers the customer, it considers the advertisers as its customer. Joe the plumbers blog on the other hand starts out as Joe telling stories as he sees them which is far more appealing to most people than a rag that warps the stories so its advertisers are never shown in a bad light. Eventually, Joe gets popular and starts to do the same crap. Thats when we just move on to Jane the house wifes blog and Joe is left right along beside all the other piles of crap that don't realize that greed is what kills them.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
1995 called. It wants its web business model back.
There's a huge gap somewhere in newspapers' thinking. (And actually, one in every content producers' thinking). People want free content. TV is the perfect example of a very successful business model where the prime channels are free of charge to the end user. Advertisers pay millions to advertise on TV. There is, absolutely, categorically, beyond any shadow of a doubt, no technological impediment to why this can't happen for online news, TV, movies, music, or whatever else.
The reason it doesn't happen is narrow-minded executives who do not think creatively enough, or try hard enough. Adapt or die. End of story.
Dinosaurs are surprised that they are shivering now that the planet has cooled...
Newspapers are a dead industry. They just don't get that they're in the Content business against the Internet, TV, radio, etc. Syndicating AP stories isn't a business model. Give me something useful and compelling, keep the opinion on the opinion pages and news on the news pages.
If all news is "free" who pays the bills of the people that cover it?
Yes, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit type news may be the way of the future (I hope not) but in depth reporting, international coverage and quality writing will benefit if people can devote 40+ hours a week to it and know they can support a family.
I didn't see full details in the linked AP article, but these schemes almost always get it backwards.
Content is ubiquitous. They need to look at charging for something other than content. For example, charge for timeliness. In other words, put up a paywall that only surrounds the latest week or two of articles. And I don't mean AP reprints, I mean timely local news coverage and opinion that isn't available anywhere else. Let people who want that information as soon as it is available pay a premium, but eventually migrate it all out to the free world. That way you build up an portfolio of work that is both useful to people do research on the net and gives a very good idea of what people will get for their subscription money.
They might even take it a step further and sell a subscription tier that does include hardcopy delivery in addition to electronic, like the WSJ and Consumer Reports do.
The Linux Weekly News works like that - you want this week's news this week - that requires a subscription, but if you want last week's news or last year's news, that's free.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
While I agree in part with this sentiment, I think there is room for paid content on sites.
Case in point, if you subscribe to New Scientist you get access to their full online articles. Not all are truncated, but there are some very juicy articles that are. There's also the Slashdot model that is in use on many other sites - articles are free, but are delayed and have ads for non-subscribers. Both methods seem to work, the first because you still get hard print, the second because people are always going to want to get the news first.
Unfortunately, in this day and age, if you're not offering free NEWS, as opposed to editorial articles, people won't pay. If the papers aren't willing to change their business model they won't survive, which is pretty much what we see happening with a lot of media lately.
The model of advertising was in the past that "50% of your advertising was ineffective, but you don't know which 50% that is".
With internet advertising you have direct clicking actually showing results without any ambiguity. You know the cost/value of any advert.
So the rationalisation is happening around 'presence' advertising, which is simply disappearing from the marketplace. That is impacting the newspapers, content brokers who were makign their living on the 50% wastage....
British Columbia's Tyee.ca just ran a fundraising appeal to bring in dollars for additional election coverage. They asked for $5,000 and got $20,000.
People will pay for good journalism, at least if they feel that the conventional outlets aren't doing the job.
Three Squirrels
"When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem."
Sure the business model of the internet news feed can beat the Rocky Mountain News trying to sell content thrown on your front yard. But none of those "outlets" originate the news content, they regurgitate what someone else paid a reporter to generate. Freedom of the press means that you can print what you want and the government cannot stop you. It does not mean consumers are entitled to all of the news for free just because it exists. Before the net gave you access were you entitled to a free daily copy of the New York Times in your home, office, or coffee shop? Even when you live in Omaha? Just because MSN will give you an article for free does not make it free to generate. What happens to freedom of the press when the "printing press" is free? Will the news business degenerate into something that looks like tech review websites? Where they decide what to review and what to say about something based on who is giving them a free sample and who is paying the freight? Will you be able to trust your news site when what they publish is based on web clicks and flash ads? Whose feet do you hold to the fire when a blog post is repeated around the world and it turns out to be made up by a drunk in Waco who was bored on a Friday night? Will Google print an apology and a retraction?
Although there are similarities to the music business, at least there you have clubs, concert tours etc where a group of guys who want to make a living in the business can do so even if 90% of what they generate is pirated off the net for free. How many of you will go to a Ruben Navarrette, Charles Krauthammer or David Ignatius concert? They write columns for the Washington Post Writers Group, syndicated in almost 200 papers nationwide. You have probably read some of their stuff on your favorite news feed. How do real news reporters make a living when there is no one to pay for what they write? They quit the news business and turn it over to Perez Hilton.
Welcome to the Idiocracy
Except it isn't free.
Most Journalists don't work for free.
Editors don't work for free.
Bandwidth be it electronic or dead tree isn't free.
The cost simply hasn't been pushed directly onto the consumer, and instead people have gotten used to a strictly indirect approach(ie ads).
If the local print newspaper had to shut down due to lack of reader interest, why should a local electronic newspaper filled with similar content succeed?
The Detroit News just went to a similar model. I still subscribe to the limited paper edition just to get the Sunday. It's a stupid, stupid, schedule. I get Thu., Sat., and Sun., but have free (as in, included with my paper subscription whose price didn't go down), the online edition.
Well, the online edition sucks ass. Computer screens aren't newspapers. I've *always* had access to the web version, which is still much, much better, especially with an RSS reader.
So even I, a non-luddite, a computer user, who now has free (for practical purposes) access to the online "print" edition, won't use it. If I won't use because of its uselessness, why the heck would they expect paid subscribers to want it?
--Jim (me)
...paying for something that is already free seems like a good business model.
Well masturbation's free and yet people will frequent hookers.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
"It doesn't matter that others in their peer group give crap away for free. If you put some effort in to making a good product, people will buy it."
Yes but the question for a business isn't so much, "will they buy it" but "will enough people buy it"?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
With a little effort. refspoof allows one to view the normally subscriber only articles: http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/03/21/wsj/
WSJ gives free access to premium content is you are being redirected from google, facebook, digg etc. Here is a dirty little secret. The entire content on WSJ is available to you for free, if you can trick WSJ into believing that you have been directed to their webpage via digg.com!
Step1) Use firefox
Step2) Install refspoof http://refspoof.mozdev.org/
Step3) Install greasemonkey https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
Step4) Install this script in greasemonkey http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/42134
Step5) Profit!!
So, it sounds like they're pulling in $15,000/mo, or $180,000/year.
Surely that's enough to pay for hosting and a couple of reporters and still make a profit.
They may not be raking it in, but I'd be pretty happy with that.
-David
I feel for them. The print paper shuts down and their online offering falls flat.
Saw this recently:
source
Don't put advice in your sig.
And if the cost of production is above that amount, it will fade away.
When distribution of information required a million dollar printing press and an army of little boys to bring three day old text to the citizen who wanted to be informed, newspapers made sense. The value of a reporter who could weigh the issues and give a factual report only minimally slanted by his opinion and experience was proven. It was worth the effort to read between the lines of the reportage and the editing to find an understanding of what actually happened.
In an age where any twit with an iPhone can stream live coverage to be archived to YouTube, where the twitterati can disseminate hot issues, where the blogosphere can issue forth its opinion of the events first, second and third hand, where Google can weigh the merits of those opinions and link not only to them but to video of what happened - all within minutes of the actual events ... not so much.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The Pegasus News manages to cover the entire Dallas-Fort Worth area with a total staff of 19 people.
Maybe InDenverTimes' own story should have been linked: "INDenverTimes provides update"
The cost simply hasn't been pushed directly onto the consumer, and instead people have gotten used to a strictly indirect approach(ie ads).
But the newspaper model is the same, the price you pay for a newpaper can not pay the costs. The ADs pay the costs.
Trash-80's FTW!
With internet advertising you have direct clicking actually showing results without any ambiguity. You know the cost/value of any advert.
It's people like you, who have no clue about advertising, which are responsible for the current advertising problem.
Most people will respond to an advertisement after they've seen it X number of times, where X is between 3 and 5.
According to your idiotic opinion, the first 2-4 views have zero value (because there was no click) - however if they didn't see them, then the actual response will never happen.
Think about it: how many TV advertisements are based on people stopping *everything* they're doing and rushing out to buy the product? Exactly zero. Why? because people would never actually do that. Why is the internet so different?
Just because we can measure that someone responded to an ad, it doesn't mean that their lack of response to the other ads was a measure of disinterest.
They just need to figure out how to make paying for online news cool and trendy.
These are but the death-pangs of an old-world media age. In 20 years newspapers will seem as quaint as an Amish buggy did to the 1950s American car-culture.
Information wants to be free. Get on board or get the hell out of the way.
The newspapers are doing it wrong. I pay an absurd amount of money for news services that actually report news.
Stratfor is the cheapest one that I use, and I appreciate it for its global reporting and analysis of situations that happens to be (gasp!) unbiased! They literally just provide the facts and logical analysis. If they did local news I'd pay them more.
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
The oxygen bar in San Francisco started selling sushi as well. then alcohol. then went out of business. Now it's a rapidly failing wine bar.
...but it wasn't there.
February made me shiver, with all the papers I didn't deliver...
People don't want to pay for something that's half full of recycled content from AP and Reuters. It's all ads and government propaganda. If the newspaper contained any information worth knowing I'm sure it would have been successful.
Maybe one day governments and businesses will just have their say on their own official web sites and journalists will simply maintain blogs.
At least that way it would be more obvious who said what and news would have less top-down editorial control.
If you put some effort in to making a good product, people will buy it.
Done and done.
Not enough sales for software I wrote long ago to make it worthwhile to me to continue trying.
Too much competition...too much freeware available...too many people hate any form of advertising (so free adware is out).
It was a worthwhile life experience while it lasted.
So for the time being I write software I need for myself now to cut down on the 'babysitting' to get what I want from the internet.
What about cable news outfits like Fox News, that according to some sources is king of the hill in its category? Similar services are rising in popularity.
It seems that there are lots of people willing to shell out money for the privilege of only getting the kind of news that they know will not challenge their world view. Same thing with genre-based entertainment content (and there are good arguments to support the idea that Fox News and MSNBC News are more entertainment than news - as illustrated by the ongoing onscreen duel between Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olberman).
There would have been a six-month gap between the ending of the print edition and startup of the web site. Plus the name and managment of the new site was different from the previous newspaper website. Other newspapers that have turned web-only had a seamless transition. For unclear reasons the news chain that owned the rocky didnt allow this.
Citizen journalism can only go so far. While I suppose it's possible for private citizens to do investigative journalism, I think that trained professionals may be far more effective at digging up information about government corruption, corporate abuses of employees/environment/customers, etc.
Sometimes (not always, but sometimes anyhow), investigative journalists can be the first ones to spot problems with investment companies, building projects where safety is being reduced by shady cost-cutting (bridges, skyscrapers, nuclear plants, etc), or other places where they fill a 'watch-dog' role. Where sources 'on the inside' who can't directly come out against the problems for fear of the safety of themselves or their families, can provide anonymous information to the journalists, so that the story can get out without being linked directly to them.
Could some of that stuff be done by citizen journalists? Sure, I suppose. Is it worth paying professionals to carry out those sorts of investigations? I believe it is.
If all the newspapers do collapse, I don't think that's a victory for open society. Who will watch the watchers? Bloggers (regulated by the government or forced to use a monitored, non-neutral net)? Cell phone-equipped flash mobs (whose devices won't work in EM-blanketed areas under police control)? Tyranny (both government and corporate) thrives in the absence of sunlight - or a true Forth Estate.
I think in addition to a shakeout in advertising prices, no one has really figured out how to make good internet advertising. Companies have become so infatuated with motion and interactivity that they have abandoned the principles that drove good advertising in the past. They resort to cheap gimicks to try to grab your attention rather than focusing on the quality of the content.
Hell is other people's code.
Geez. What do your kids call you, "daddy sunshine"?
I know lots of people are going to say "Well duh, why would I pay for stuff I can get for free elsewhere?" but the fact is that most "news" is shit so why would any intelligent person really WANT to pay for it if they didn't have to?
News has, to a great degree, been reduced to the level of a trivial hobby for most people. Yes, you read the paper, but only out of habit and some vague hope that it's "informing" you in some quasi-educational way. It's become the mental equivalent of chewing gum. Look at a "quality" newspaper and roughly 60%-80% of it will be about people - what Barak had for breakfast, what Michael did in Beverly Hills, etc. etc. Very little is of any consequence that might reasonably be said to educate you about your life or what's really happening around you.
The main reason for this is that it's written by poorly-paid, over-worked journalists bullied by their editors to provide a "story" with an "angle" which basically means they are semi-forced to lie and report the facts highly selectively. Either that or just focus on telling stories about what Obama did in his garden, or what the Hoff did when he went to LA. It's then syndicated by one of a handful of "news organisations" after being "edited" (for which read "vetted to see if they can sell it"), then edited and sub-edited some more before it gets slapped out in front of the readers.
If you think I'm being cynical, I challenge anyone who has ever had first-hand knowledge of an event that was reported by the main stream new media to say that it reported it fairly and in a way that represents the way the event took place. It's incredibly rare that such fairness occurs (at least first time). Most "news" is barely the truth, and most events happening around the world are ignored because the gatekeepers of news media don't think it's "newsworthy" - ie they can't sell it, or it might piss off their advertisers or other stakeholders like their board members or shareholders.
Hell, you get more reality on /. than you do in the New York times, and that's saying something.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Question:
Why doesn't someone pirate the Wall Street Journal and or Crain's Chicago Business content and re-post elsewhere?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.