Recovering Journalist

Is the Alacarticle the Answer to Selling Content Online?

Could it be that publishers are looking at the notion of charging for online content all wrong?

To date, just about all the talk and experiments with paid content have involved selling online subscriptions or, on the iPad, individual issues. Makes sense, since that's how publishers historically have sold their print versions. Or, actually, it doesn't make sense, because many of us believe that online customers who can find equivalent free content elsewhere will simply ignore the publishers' subscription/single-copy offers.

We need more empirical evidence to prove or disprove these theories and settle this religious debate, but so far, only a handful of specialized sites have made online subscriptions work, the jury is still out on The New York Times' much-watched Web subscription effort and single-copy magazine sales on the iPad started strong and then sputtered in most cases.

But maybe there's another model: selling content by the article.

Last week, Fortune magazine published a big takeout on Apple—and held it off the magazine's Web site. Instead, it made Inside Apple available as a downloadable file for Amazon's Kindle, at 99 cents a pop. 

By all accounts, it sold like hotcakes, even reaching the Top 10 in Amazon's Kindle bestseller list. Behold: the a la carte article. Let's call it the alacarticle.

The alacarticle may not be the ultimate answer to legacy media's online revenue woes—no one solution is. But Fortune's experience, while a limited sample, of course, seems to indicate that readers will pay by the story, under the right conditions.

For years, some publishers have babbled hopefully about "micropayments," a term none of them really seemed to be able to define. Theoretically, I think, it meant that any article could be sold for a few pennies, but the publishers could never quite figure out how to actually collect those pennies (long-established online payment systems like, oh, PayPal, Amazon and iTunes being just a tad too futuristic for these publishers to grasp, apparently). 

For all the talk about the micropayment idea, the problem is that, even with the long tail, there's not a big market for the vast majority of articles, and too much free competition. Advertising is still a much better bet for mass-market online publishing revenue, as it always has been in print.

But there may be a market for certain, high-interest, high-value articles, as Fortune is demonstrating. If the (excellent) argument against online subscriptions is that readers can usually find pretty much the same news and information elsewhere, for free, then maybe Fortune's alacarticle experiment shows that there may still be specific stories or packages that could be held off the Web and made available as Kindle or iBook downloads, or apps.

The number of potential stories that fit this model is small—they probably have to be major and exclusive—and there's a calculable tradeoff in lost traffic and associated ad sales. But the Fortune experiment points to a new way of selling content that lets customers buy just a story they want, rather than a broad subscription they may not care for. Other examples are appearing as well: Long-form journalism site Byliner is also selling content by the story for Kindle and iPad, incidentally. And ProPublica's "Wall Street Money Machine" investigation was just made available as a 99-cent Kindle download.

If all this sounds familiar, it's because there's a parallel in the recent evolution of the music industry, which found its favorite form of distribution, the album, unbundled by iTunes so that customers could buy just the songs they wanted, individually. The music industry is still grumbling about this, but selling songs a la carte is preferable to not selling albums at all. Maybe that's also true of selling alacarticles, as opposed to subscriptions. It's giving the customers what they want, at a price they're willing to pay. What a concept.

 

 

 

A (Slightly) Premature Report of the Death of The New York Times

Former Oracle/Microsoft exec Dick Brass famously predicted more than 10 years ago that the last print edition of The New York Times would roll off the presses in 2018. Slate and a group of parodists have jumped the gun a bit, imagining a suddenly final edition of the Times. In the grand tradition of 1978's Not The New York Times, it's hilarious. But I'm still betting on Brass' prediction. 

Understanding the Business of Journalism: The Columbia J-School Report

Everybody in journalism should spend time reading Columbia Journalism School's voluminous new report on the digital journalism business. Bill Grueskin and team have done a superb job of surveying and encapsulating, in very clear (and clear-eyed) language, the current state of the online journalism business, including a wealth of interesting examples and case studies.

It's hard to summarize the many findings here, many of which have been clear to a lot of us for a long time. At the risk of oversimplifying, I'd say the report concludes that there's money to be made in digital journalism, that there are online news sites making money (usually by keeping costs very low), and that the onus is on legacy journalism businesses to double-down further reinvent themselves to adapt to the revolutionary changes in the industry.

But probably the best conclusion in the study is a striking quote from Randall Rothenberg, the former New York Times reporter who now runs the Internet Advertising Bureau: 

"Here's the problem: Journalists just don't understand their business."

Amen to that. I'm becoming more involved in teaching business and entrepreneurialism to journalists (I taught an entrepreneurialism course at University of Maryland this semester, I'm leading a session on business at a Knight Digital Media Center journalist "boot camp" next week, etc.) for precisely that reason: It's critically important that journalists become more business-literate and understand how their business works. Reading the Columbia report will go a long way towards educating journalists about their business, what's happening to it, and how to start fixing it.