Helmsley Media

A recent post I read over at Techdirt has gotten me thinking a lot about the “free vs paid content” debate online. Apparently Rupert Murdoch is looking to stop Google from indexing a lot of News Corp’s websites in favour of putting up paywalls that require users to pay a subscription fee from access to his content.

Mark Cuban thinks this is a genius move on Murdoch’s part. The game changer in his opinion is Twitter, Facebook and similar social media sharing tools because they allow a more organic dissemination of news content than search. I agree, that for real time news content receiving something from your friends via Twitter or Facebook is more likely to pull your interest towards reading that content. However, I don’t think Twitter and Facebook are going to be of much value when the site has a paywall. You are less likely to share content that is behind a paywall, and your friends/contacts are less likely to view it once they realize they have to pay for it. Their first instinct is going to be “is this an affiliate link?” and with all the Twitter and Facebook spam that’s getting passed around now I wouldn’t blame them.

More and more I’m starting to think that online media is starting to merge media with direct response marketing concepts. Advertising revenue is hardly enough if you can only generate a CPM of $2-3! There has to be other ways of monetizing, and paid content could be worth looking at. I think paid content is better suited to niche audiences, but it could be done for a larger audience, especially something like the Wall Street Journal which is targeting a more affluent, business oriented audience who need this information quickly. The challenge is protecting that content. What is to stop a blogger or other publication from paraphrasing your content? You can’t copyright news or ideas, just the specific words that you wrote. I know GigaOM for example recently launched GigaOM Pro with an annual price of $79 for access to their content

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Google doesn’t have to be everything online. Of course they are the dominant company for the time being, but keep in mind they are barely 11 years old and things change very rapidly online. I often think about the internet marketing community and how they manage to thrive oftentimes paying for all of their traffic, and not depending on search traffic at all. If you know your conversion rates and other metrics, buying visitors is a valid option if your customer acquisition costs are lower than your prices. There are all sorts of ways to build your own lists of prospects, and all sorts of ways to make money of of them. The idea of not depending so heavily on Google is potentially a good move on Murdoch’s part, and an even better move if he can get other major media companies to follow suit. It is also of course a very risky move, but as they say fortune favours the bold.

TechDirt recently published an article title “YouTube Is Changing How We Think About Video” that talks about how online videos can’t really be directly compared to movies or television programming, they’re something different, something new.

So if internet videos are different from movies and television, and we see different artists within those mediums, could we see different artists starting to take hold of online video? Director J.J. Abrams is enormously successful as a television producer with hits like Felicity, Alias and of course lost, but he has also produced films, and directed the Mission Impossible 3 movie, so cross-over success is common, but certain people really excel in a particular medium.

Online video is growing very quickly, and I think we can expect to see it gain ground on other mediums in terms of profitability. This could be a great time to start establishing oneself as an online video artist, whether that is as a director, producer, or even a performer. So, who will end up being the first Spielberg of online video?

I have to say, Tech Dirt is one of my favourite websites right now. Half of all the interesting media industry related articles I’m reading right now are coming from them. Anyway, I came across this interesting article about NBC’s general counsel Rick Cotton suggesting that NBC and SNL gained nothing from “Lazy Sunday” going viral on YouTube, and that the small start-up only became successful as a result of this piracy (or perhaps this TYPE of piracy).

To be fair, I did not see or hear Cotton making these statements, but I do believe that old media companies like NBC would have inflexible views like this and how they can leverage their content online for exposure. SNL was starting to lose it’s luster when they started to have these viral hits. I watch SNL now hoping to see a new, good digital short.

I do understand their reactionary behaviour to this situation, they are desperate to find a way to either stop, or profit from the current direction that media is headed, but they have to realize that trying to stop it is not going to be successful. I do agree that content providers are being stolen from when people use Bit Torrent and other online video sharing services, but you aren’t going to stop it, so you need to find a way to COMPETE AGAINST it. That’s what iTunes has done with their store.