Slashdot Mirror
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.
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
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?
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
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?
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
Free to Air TV is the perfect example of a monopoly business model where there is an artifical constraint (Limited Frequency Allocation) on the number of entrants to the market. Where digital TV, etc has increased the number of players, revenue/earnings has dropped signficantly.
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.
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
There's a huge gap somewhere in newspapers' thinking. (And actually, one in every content producers' thinking). People want free content.
There appears to be one in most content consumers' thinking, too. There is no such thing as free. Everything costs somebody, something.
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.
Other, you mean, than the ease of automatic filtering of online adverts? Online adverts cost a hell of lot less than TV adverts because they're too easy to avoid. This will only get worse. As technology advances and TV adverts become easier to filter out, TV advertisers will have options like increased product placement available to them (imagine little "buy now!" buttons hovering over laptops in CSI). These tricks will likely neither be possible nor desirable in text-based services like online news.
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.
Indeed. I think the "adaption" that's been postulated elsewhere is quite possible: first, smaller news outfits die as advertising revenue on online services fails to replace lost revenue from newspapers; then, the few remaining big players get together and agree to simultaneously switch business models. Even if they don't do that, you're still left with a few large corporations controlling what news the public sees.
Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
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 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 ----