A lot of the response I’ve gotten, in comments and e-mails, to my first post about Web sites charging for content was pretty simplistic, along the lines of: “But we just don’t think anybody will pay.” That’s a defeatist attitude, and it shows how much media companies have undervalued the content they produce. There are examples on the Web of people paying for content; I believe the reason there aren’t more is because a lot of Web sites are afraid to experiment. There’s just an assumption that it can’t be done, without a lot of firsthand experience to back up that assumption.
That’s why experiments like The New York Times’ TimesSelect are so interesting—even though I think the Times made a mistake in cordoning off its columnists (but very smartly created an “all you can eat” version of its archives). Another interesting experiment: The Sacramento Bee recently announced that it would provide access to enhanced California political and government content under the CapitolAlert brand for $499 a year. Another McClatchy paper, the Kansas City Star, just announced a similar product, Prime Buzz, at a $395 annual price point.
The pricetags on the Bee and Star products strike me as too high by a factor of 10 for consumer offerings, which is how they appear to be marketed. Those prices seem to be aimed more at professional audiences (i.e. lobbyists), who don't blink at paying that kind of money for a newsletter or trade publication. Nonetheless, these are interesting efforts to try to extract cash from content that certainly has value to some portion of the sites’ readership.
There are a number of ways that media Web sites can experiment with charging for content. Local newspapers could let print subscribers access local news on the Web site for free and charge non-print-subscribers for access. (What’s the point of those cockamamie registration systems that newspaper sites have, anyway? Sheesh, if you’re going to make me register, then give me a damn good reason—or let me get in free if I’m already a print customer.) Or provide paid access—through subscriptions or pay-per-view services—to unique content, databases or other information.
Another suggestion that comes up now and then is to create some sort of industry-wide “EZ-Pass” solution to provide paid access to a lot of different sites. Interesting idea, but a bear to administer and even harder to get a lot of different media companies to agree to.
One way or another, the trick is to provide value for the cost. You can’t charge for information that’s widely available elsewhere, such as commodity wire service news. You’ve got to tease out content that people will be willing to pay for. You also probably can’t justify, in most cases, putting the entire site behind the subscription wall. Again, a lot of the content is likely to be available elsewhere, and you have to leave some content available for free to lure occasional visitors into becoming regular customers (and also to give search engines something to spider).
The paragon of online subscriptions, the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.com, does an excellent job of this by putting a few stories a day outside the subscription wall and allowing subscribers to e-mail stories to non-subscribers, where they stay freely available for a few days. In other words, you’ve got to have some finesse and sophistication about what you charge for, and how.
There’s more and more unique content on Web sites these days that could be put behind a subscription wall. Blogs, video, databases, special multimedia features, Web-only columns, online discussions—all are potential candidates for subscription (or pay-per-view) models. If they’re so unique and special, why be timid about charging for them? Have confidence that readers will recognize the quality of what you produce and want to pay to see it.
There’s an interesting case study on this: ESPN.com, which debuted in the mid-90s as a subscription site and then went free a few years back. But about three years ago, ESPN.com began moving back to a subscription model. This time around, it did it very carefully—almost stealthily.
What ESPN.com did was to gradually move popular and unique features, one by one, into its subscription-online Insider plan. Commodity sports coverage stayed outside the pay wall. But popular columns and features gradually got moved “inside.”
As a regular reader of ESPN.com, I watched this with great interest. I’d cancelled my paid subscription years ago when it had proved worthless as the site went mostly free. But as Insider became more prevalent over the past couple of years, I knew that eventually they were going to win me back as a customer. Gradually, I lost access to columns, discussions and other features that I cared about, until they hit the tipping point: Peter Gammons’ popular baseball notes column. The week Gammons went behind the subscription wall, ESPN.com Insider had me as a $49-a-year paid subscriber again. It was very slick, very patient and very effective—a model for how media sites can switch customers from free to paid. Other media and Web companies should be looking hard at the ESPN model. (Apparently to give the online subscription extra value, ESPN also sends you its magazine if you subscribe to the Insider service; personally, I’d just as soon do without the extra paper.)
As ESPN demonstrates, going to a paid model isn't an either-or proposition, which is how many in the Web media world seem to view it. It's a matter of picking your spots, putting the right (valuable) content behind the pay wall and being careful about how you charge for content.
I wish that media site managers would be bolder about trying to find a way to at least experiment with charging for online content. You don’t know if it’s going to work until you try it. In an era when every penny is critical to media operations and there’s concern that online advertising hasn’t matured sufficiently to pay the freight, it seems to me that forward-thinking companies should be looking to online subscriptions and other payment systems as additional sources of revenue.
As you point out, a site should make sure it's got added-value content before it starts charging, and the fee should be reasonable for the average consumer. An Internet-wide "EZ-Pass" won't happen anytime soon, but an alliance of complementary sites might be able to start charging a collective fee for premium content. For example, washingtonpost.com could team up with sites that specialize in technology, health, investing -- any content that the Post doesn't "own," as it does Washington political coverage. The Post and those specialty sites could charge one annual fee ($75 or so) that they'd share based on their contributed value. The trick, of course, would be for the Post and the specialty sites to choose content for premium placement. But your personal example of ESPN/the Gammons baseball notes column perhaps points the way.
Posted by: Tom Grubisich | February 21, 2007 at 01:49 PM
The EZ pass is being rolled out by a publisher consortium called congoo. I think they have something. Who would subscribe to MTV? But when you roll in ESPN, Nikolodeon and 100 other channels, you have a cable TV model that is very attractive.
Posted by: Amy Fuller | February 21, 2007 at 05:55 PM
You say TimesSelect made a mistake in choosing to cordon off its columnists. Why? If newspapers are to make some content paid and some free, how do they decide which is which?
What if most content was free, but community features like a personal user profile pages/blogs and article comments were paid?
That would help root out the people who leave obnoxious, thoughtless comments because those people likely aren't committed enough to the publication to be paying customers.
Posted by: Mary Specht | February 26, 2007 at 10:01 PM