Journalism Online in Lancaster: Dead on Arrival?

At long last, the much-ballyhooed Journalism Online paid-online-subscription engine is launching its first test. And like almost everything involving Journalism Online, it's a head-scratcher.

Beginning immediately, LancasterOnline—the Web version of Pennsylvania's Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era (maybe they should invest in bit.ly for newspaper names)—will begin limiting access to out-of-market visitors who want to read the paper's obituaries. According to Poynter's Bill Mitchell, the pay wall will kick in if a visitor reads more than seven obits in a month. At that point, a frequent obit reader will be asked to pay $1.99 a month (or $19.99 a year) to read more about the dead.

Are they serious? Are there really that many people people visiting the Lancaster site to read obits? Really? 

The folks in Lancaster claim to have done the math that proves there's a substantial out of town audience for obits, though it's based on a lot of guesswork (and probably proves, once again, that journalists really aren't that good at math). Notably, Lancaster seems to base its projections on traffic numbers from the not-so-reliable Google Analytics rather than on data from the site's internal logs, which would be much more precise. That seems odd.

According to Mitchell's story, LancasterOnline estimates that 100,000 out-of-market visitors to the site read obits each year. And the site reckons that more than 10 percent of them do it—yes, read obits—several times a week. Okaaaay. Taking the math further, Lancaster estimates that nearly 90,000 visitors to the site read the obits at least once a week, and 17,692 visitors read the obits four times a week.

These numbers are preposterous. Remember, this is little LancasterOnline, not NewYorkTimes.com or WashingtonPost.com. I find it hard to believe that Lancaster has that sort of constant, repeat traffic to its obits—or else it's got an audience with a truly obsessive fascination with grazing news about local deaths. (The paper claims that 5 percent of its site's 47.4 million page views last year went to obits. Seems high.) 

There's more funky math: Extrapolating from those numbers, and using Journalism Online's subscription system, with its $1.99/month or $19.99/year model, Lancaster thinks it can milk this alleged frequent-obit audience to the tune of $100,000 to $500,000 a year. Worst case: $10,000 to $50,000 the first year. I would suggest that they recalculate that worst case. As Mitchell points out, "to hit $100,000 in annual revenue, LancasterOnline will need to persuade just over 5,000 of its out-of-area obit readers to cough up $19.99 a year." 

That ain't gonna happen, folks. Not a chance. Every assumption it's based on—from projected audience to the percentage of readers that might be willing to pay—is flawed. Again, the theory is that Lancaster will be able to charge a fee to non-local readers who look at more than seven obituaries a month. That strikes me as a very, very unusual (and tiny) use case. 

In any event, is this the best test case that Journalism Online can find to prove its theory that people will pay for something they previously got for free? Remember, there's no added value here—just a penalty for being a frequent reader of the obits. Journalism Online claims to have hundreds of papers signed up to test paid models, and is promising more tests soon. But it's been tight-lipped about names, and this seemingly flawed first example doesn't inspire confidence in the venture's alleged partnerships.

Those of us who are skeptical that newspapers can charge online subscription fees for most content base our objections on a couple of theories: That there will continue to be free alternatives for a lot of the content put behind paywalls, and that content needs to be truly unique—and value-added—to justify asking readers to pay. As TBD.com's Jim Brady has so wisely said, just wanting to charge for something doesn't really constitute a business model. The Lancaster obits may pass the first test, but they fail the second test.

We need some solid, real-world tests of paid subscription models to determine, once and for all, who's right in this religious war between advocates of paid vs. free online news products. Journalism Online is providing a mechanism to run those tests. But it sure could have picked a better place than the obituary page of LancasterOnline to do it. By focusing on very limited content underpinned by highly suspect numbers, this test, I'm afraid, is destined for an early grave.

PS: David Brauer of MinnPost also sees dead people. And Steve Buttry puts another nail in the coffin.

Comments

[Tish Grier]

I wonder how much Journalism Online charged them for this service. They might have been able to set up something like this thru Copyright Clearance Center for free. CCC does a lot with papers like the NYTimes for creating revenue from reprints, etc.

I also doubt that there's an online frequent-obit reader audience. Esp. for local. Most of those folks are still reading the newspaper daily, and cutting out the important ones.

[Yelvington]

Brauer has a similar take:

http://bit.ly/abutJD

But it may be that the Lancaster test is more about proving the (flexible) techology and the customer-service components of Press+, not a test of any particular model.

[Colinrmathews]

I wonder how much of their traffic is coming from bots or scrapers who are trying to aggregate the obit content for sites like Topix, Fwix and the many, many splogs that want to grab the content. Not likely they'll pay for access.

[Tim Windsor]

Step one: Decide to test the system. Fair enough.

Step two: Test the system in a way that won't directly impact local users. Done.

Step three: Make wild revenue projections associated with the test. Neglect to anticipate how much of out-of-market repeat traffic is from aggregators as Colin notes. Done and done.

If - IF! - they get 5% of those 17,692 out-of-market frequent obit-readers to convert (and that would be a wildly successful percentage), and if each and every one of them goes for the full-year subscription, this will be worth a little under $18,000.

That's real revenue, of course, and maybe if they carve off another ten or twenty slices like it, they could start considering this a success, but Mark's right that they're fever-dreaming if they think they're anywhere in the vicinity of six-figures with this scheme.

Tim

[Dbullard]

I am a local news web publisher. Our web-only local news site is 11 years old, one of the oldest around.

I can tell you from experience that traffic to obituaries and police logs forms the backbone of a local news website.

That said, they'll never get people to cough up 20 bucks a year just to see the dead.

Most funeral homes publish their own obits on their websites (if they have one) and other news sites aggregate obits as well.

If they want to get people to pay for content, they've picked exactly the wrong stuff. Obits are commodity content. What is it that the paper does that has high value and can't be found anywhere else? That's where to start, if you're going to go down that road.

Dave Bullard
OswegoCountyToday.com

[Rakeshlobster]

Aside from the conceptual stupidity and insanely optimistic projections, let's look at the implementation:
- annoying interstitial upsell for press+ the first time you click on an obit
- interstitial the fifth time you click on an obit
- use another browser or go in to porn mode on your browser and the counter resets -- unlimited reading

[Matt Wedgwood]

People are never going to pay for internet news. Its just not going to happen.

[Stevebuttry]

Excellent insight, as usual, Mark. You inspired me to blog on the insanity of this "double dip on death." http://bit.ly/cB1TTO

[Jheasly]

+1 with what Dbullard says. Ours is the Web site of a medium-sized daily and obits, blotter items and the local university sports coverage are the backbone of our site (not necessarily in that order). That LancasterOnline idn't NYT or WaPo is *precisely* the point.

While our site gets its share of Web crawlers, we could post that the BP well was spouting bubble gum and there'd be nary a ripple, but if a day's worth of obits doesn't get posted, we hear about it.

Having said all that, it doesn't mean the LancasterOnline projections are any more on target, but I don't think that for a community paper, starting with obits is that crazy.

[Adam McKay]

This seems too much for a local community paper to project. To base it on Google Analytics is dangerous and irresponsible. I think they seriously need to hire Dave Bullard as a consultant and get their numbers straight.