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.

I recently came across an article on Bloomberg.com about the possible demise of the National Post.

“The National Post Company has never generated a profit and it continues to suffer significant operating losses,” Canwest, which is in bankruptcy protection, said in a court filing. Canwest plans to seek a judge’s permission to transfer the paper to Canwest Ltd. Partnership, which holds Canwest’s other newspaper businesses and isn’t in bankruptcy.

I know that a lot of people talk about the death of the newspaper industry and how much trouble their in etc etc, but let’s be honest here, the business model is not sustainable anymore. It isn’t necessary for news to be communicated through ink and paper, the news industry isn’t dying, just the newsPAPER industry. To complain about it would be like complaining about the demise of the buggy whip industry when the automobile became widely affordable. The business models aren’t quite so clear yet, but that doesn’t mean that the world is going to fall into never ending anarchy. Companies like Canwest rested on their laurels for a long time, content with their position and their fat profits for years. The current times require innovation and adaptation to survive, so get with the times or die.

It’s tough with news content because it’s incredibly easy to paraphrase news content, so protecting your work is more or less impossible, but that shows them they have to differentiate elsewhere. Yes, you need good reporting and storytelling, but you need to focus on community and building a following more than ever. With tools like Twitter available news travels at the speed of thought now. Someone sees something significant happen and as quickly as they can update their Twitter on their iPhone everyone following them knows what they witnessed. The established media (I won’t call them traditional for the time being) need to tap into the power of the zeitgeist, what’s happening now on the minds of their audience, and they need to harness that information. I think provided editorial, and fact checking layers to that stream of consciousness from the masses is valuable for sure, and there will always be a place for that too, but don’t think you can just talk at your audience anymore.

Google is a fantastic tool for organizing the world’s information, and Twitter is a fantastic tool for extracting what is on the minds of the masses. I could definitely see some synergies there, especially from a news perspective since news is all about relevance and timeliness. Twitter could help Google to speed up the pace at which they gather information from the zeitgeist. Anyway, that’s something another post on another day.