As industry leaders and innovators converge on the Times Center in Manhattan for what paidContent is billing as its “first namesake conference,” I’ll be on the lookout for answers to several key questions:
- Who has a handle on what is involved in creating the “new value” that is necessary to warrant new payment from users?
- To what extent are news organizations (and entrepreneurs) imagining user interactions with news that can translate “paid content” into “paid experience”?
- If payment from users is so critical to the future of journalism — and I believe it is — what are media executives doing to involve those users in deciding what they’ll pay for?
One thing I won’t look for is discussion of paid content as an established business model. As I concluded in the paper I wrote for my Shorenstein Fellowship [PDF], posted today on the Shorenstein site, the search for ways to sustain journalism is still a long way from the business model stage.
But it is possible, reflected in the bullets above, to establish a “user-first” framework for conducting the experiments that are likely to yield such business models in the long run.
My paper sorts dozens of user-first innovations into a typology of four categories: paid content, advertising, partnerships and new ventures.
As vendors such as Steven Brill’s Journalism Online roll out their services with early clients, the paid content debate is moving from debate to actual experimentation.
Forrester Research projected spending on online content at about $3 billion for 2009 — but very little for local news. (The report is not available online for free.) Forrester’s Sarah Rotman Epps estimated that only 3 percent of Internet users in the U.S. have paid to access digital information; and such spending was done by a tiny slice of the population — those with an average household income of nearly $100,000.
Forrester has found such payments flowing almost exclusively from niches — work-related areas such as financial and government information, along with information relating to personal passions such as wine and sports. Forrester is expected to update its research with a presentation at Friday’s conference.
Paid content is not simply about news and information. Media economist Robert Picard argues: “It is not enough to make content informative, relevant, interesting and believable. To gain loyal audiences willing to provide the financial support needed for the future, news organizations must provide engaging, pleasing and memorable experiences to their users.”
So far, there are few examples of such “memorable experiences” created by news organizations. But I have seen some experiments that go beyond the blunt instrument of pay walls:
- The Miami Herald’s iPhone app for Miami Dolphins coverage. Rather than erect a pay wall in front of such coverage, the paper created an app and sold 13,000 of them at $1.99 last fall. More significantly, the move provided a framework for the Herald to create other apps for other Florida sports teams.
- The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s PG+ service, which charges $3.99 a month (or $35.88 a year) for access to extra content, mostly focused on politics, music and life in Pittsburgh. Editor David Shribman hopes the service will appeal especially to the estimated 500,000 former Pittsburgh residents around the country and the world. He won’t say how many subscriptions the paper has sold, limiting his assessment in a telephone conversation last year to: “We’re making steady progress and we’re not going to abandon it.”
- The Chicago News Cooperative‘s plans to charge $2 per week for membership in a co-op that founder Jim O’Shea, formerly with the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, hopes will include user participation in “news interest networks.”
- Upcoming plans by the online site of the newspapers in Lancaster, Pa., to charge out-of-market users to view obituaries (after they exceeded a certain minimum number of views per month). The experiment by the Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era is expected to be among the first ventures to go public with Journalism Online.
