Roger Ebert and a few hundred thousand of his closest friends and readers are hammering out a new business model for media online.
(Friday update via an e-mail from Ebert: “Membership is now in the thousands.”)
The money involved is small, just $4.99 a year, an amount dwarfed by an appreciation for what the film critic’s fans describe not only as his decades of movie guidance but the opportunity he began providing them last week to express that appreciation with a few pennies each week.
In fact, the best way to describe this emerging new revenue stream might well be the “Appreciation Model,” a wrinkle on the membership and tip jar approaches rooted in a strong relationship between content provider and user.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks for Ebert. In addition to launching his club and making his Oscar picks, he appeared on Oprah and demonstrated new technology that enables him to speak, via computer simulation, for the first time since losing his voice to cancer-related surgery.
Since Ebert invited readers to pay him $4.99 (the price goes up to $5 on April 1) for a membership with 10 benefits, nearly 500 readers have responded, some of them here and some of them here. Most of the posters indicated they had already clicked the “subscribe” button and joined up.
“I am a babe in the woods when it comes to monetizing Web content, and am drowning in advice,” Ebert told me by e-mail earlier this week. Referring to the advice offered by many who posted responses to his Ebert Club invitation, he added: “Apparently I have been taken up by Web gurus as a sort of basket case. To begin with, everyone says I should have charged more.”
One fan who didn’t say that was Lisa VanDercar, who posted the following to Ebert’s blog: “We’re totally broke, unemployed all that, but I’m happy to give you $5 a year for all that you’ve brought to my life and my family’s. I hope you are successful with this. My eldest child is going to be a journalism major in the fall. I want writers to be able to make a living.”
In a follow-up e-mail exchange, VanDercar told me, “I read Roger Ebert once a week at least — on Fridays when we are looking at new movies for the weekend — whether to rent them, [go to the] dollar theater or go all the way and see opening night. $4.99 is nothing. It’s totally worth it to me. If it had been over $20, I would’ve thought twice maybe.”
VanDercar’s e-mailed comments, along with the discussion threads on Ebert’s blog, represent a valuable (and free) focus group for media execs trying to read the minds of potential paying customers online. Said VanDercar, “I think it comes down to relevance to my life and the size of the fee.”
Ebert said his latest work — along with his archive of 10,000 previously published reviews — will remain free for all on the site. Among the benefits he listed for club members:
- A private discussion thread
- An improved newsletter, which Ebert points out will continue to be free to all
- “The Web Report: Unexpected and delightful web discoveries. I find links myself. Readers send me amazing pages…”
- “Advance notice of Ebertfest tickets going on sale. The festival sells out early every year. At Ebertfest, I’ll hold a meet-and-greet for club members.”
- “You will be helping enormously to support this Web site. Well, that’s worth something, isn’t it?”
Ebert avoided the main paywall pitfall I discovered in the course of my recent Shorenstein paper [PDF] exploring business models for news: imposing a fee today for content that yesterday was free. Instead, Ebert said he would provide what media economist Robert Picard [PDF] and others characterize as “new value” and kept the price for it low.
The price is so low, in fact, that Ebert would need thousands more members to generate significant revenue. As Ebert indicated in his e-mail note, a lot of readers suggested he could charge a lot more. At the risk of complicating an appealingly simple plan, Ebert’s real opportunity may lie not in choosing a high price or a low price, but in offering a handful of price points that satisfy different user needs and interests.
Staci Kramer summed up Ebert’s offer like this on PaidContent.org: “The price is less than a movie ticket, small enough to be an impulse buy and large enough to possibly create some meaningful income without creating a lot of extra work for Ebert. (Heck, I just stopped writing long enough to sign up.)”
Ebert also invited suggestions for “live chats for Club members and things like that,” prompting detailed responses and his own follow-up notes to readers. He also got tips for maximizing his site’s advertising revenue and complaints about PayPal. Several people echoed Groucho Marx’s concern about belonging to a club “that would have me as a member.”
Mostly, though, readers responded to three key elements of Ebert’s offer:
- The opportunity to support the work of someone they’ve long admired and appreciated.
- The opportunity to become part of something reflecting their interests and, in some cases, their passion about movies.
- The opportunity to enjoy both of those benefits at a very, very low price.
“I dreamed up the content on my own,” Ebert said of the special content he plans for members. “I hope the newsletter will exceed expectations. We shall see.”
Some of his fans had quite a bit more to say.
“I’m in and I’m proud of it,” Syracuse university student Jared Diamond said of his decision to join Ebert’s club. Diamond also informed Ebert that he had won a big student journalism award, explaining: “Because you are one of my greatest influences in journalism, I felt compelled to tell you [of] my success and happiness.”
Ebert added this comment to the student’s post, bolded to indicate material added by the blog host: “Hey, congratulations! I remember you when you first came around.“
By e-mail, Diamond told me that he does not pay for other content online, but jumped at the chance to pay for what he described as “the best blog on the Internet,” adding: “Mr. Ebert is one of my role models and inspirations both personally and professionally, and his commentary consistently reflects his brilliance and wit.”
He added, “The first time Roger responded to a comment I left on the blog, I was shocked. I did not realize he took the time to read every post and often write back. He mentioned me and my comment in a later post, which ranks as one of my prouder moments in recent memories. That Roger responds is another appeal aspect of the blog. As a user, I feel connected to Roger in some way. As if he values what we say as much as we value what he says.”
In my e-mail exchange with Ebert, I pushed for some hard numbers about sign-ups so far. I didn’t get very far: “How many members?” Ebert responded. “None of your beeswax.”
Of course, maybe that’s just the kind of inside information that should be reserved for paying members of the Ebert Club.
