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The Future of Content - Free or Paid?
Last week Rupert Murdoch announced that News Corp is set to start charging online customers for news content across all its websites to make its content “better and differentiate it from other people”. It's major issue and talking point for the industry so . . . What do you think? Do you agree? Will it work? If so, will others follow? Can it only work for certain industries?
As a premium research tool we have to admit it's an issue that's close to our hearts so (with a slight vested interest!) here is our opinion to kick things off . . .
News is more immediate today than ever before. Elections, wars, deaths even celebrity hairstyles are now reported by enthusiastic spotters via blogs, Twitter, Facebook updates and similar before traditional media.
Over the past 3-4 years newspapers and magazine publishers have aggressively cut their costbase in order to balance the books, (countering reduced online advertising revenues) and compete with ‘free’. For quality newspapers, as Rupert Murdoch recognises, this is always going to be a battle that the publishing industry will lose. With a reduced costbase it is difficult to differentiate content. The result is mediocre reporting, rehashed content from the Associated Press (AP), Chinese whispers and homogenised content. So how can newspapers compete with free and produce quality content?
There are multiple business models that range from Premium (paid eg Economist), to Freemium (part-paid eg Financial Times) to Free and ad-funded (eg thelondonpaper). So which model to choose? Much depends on the remit of the brand and the potential size of the audience. If the aim is to deliver a casual read for a mass market then Free can work as advertising doesn’t necessarily require quality content as a bed partner but it does require reach. In such cases casual entertainment (often cheap to produce content) is the order of the day. In many cases this is what readers want as anyone who heard Stefano Hatfield (Editor of thelondonpaper) speak alongside Chris Anderson the other week can testify.
If the aim is to deliver high quality content that readers rely on, perhaps professionally, then the choice of model is more difficult. As Murdoch observes, ‘Quality journalism is not cheap.’ Publishers can either charge readers (Premium or Freemium) or reduce the quality (Free). In practice readers requiring content that can be relied on seek authority and originality and are willing to pay for it eg FT, Economist and WSJ. This was captured succinctly last year by Kevin Kelly who wrote an interesting article ‘Better than free’.
There may be tweets from elections in Iran which are first-hand but do they represent ‘balanced’ thinking or informed opinion? They tell you the ‘what’ but not the ‘why’. In a world where ‘news’ travels faster than ever before, value is created by both immediacy and the supplement of authoritative and original analysis which in turn delivers real insight. Free can deliver immediacy but can it deliver analysis that is authoritative and original?
You can read our view in full at our blog (http://c8blog.canvas8.com/blog/) so feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think.
Thanks.
As a premium research tool we have to admit it's an issue that's close to our hearts so (with a slight vested interest!) here is our opinion to kick things off . . .
News is more immediate today than ever before. Elections, wars, deaths even celebrity hairstyles are now reported by enthusiastic spotters via blogs, Twitter, Facebook updates and similar before traditional media.
Over the past 3-4 years newspapers and magazine publishers have aggressively cut their costbase in order to balance the books, (countering reduced online advertising revenues) and compete with ‘free’. For quality newspapers, as Rupert Murdoch recognises, this is always going to be a battle that the publishing industry will lose. With a reduced costbase it is difficult to differentiate content. The result is mediocre reporting, rehashed content from the Associated Press (AP), Chinese whispers and homogenised content. So how can newspapers compete with free and produce quality content?
There are multiple business models that range from Premium (paid eg Economist), to Freemium (part-paid eg Financial Times) to Free and ad-funded (eg thelondonpaper). So which model to choose? Much depends on the remit of the brand and the potential size of the audience. If the aim is to deliver a casual read for a mass market then Free can work as advertising doesn’t necessarily require quality content as a bed partner but it does require reach. In such cases casual entertainment (often cheap to produce content) is the order of the day. In many cases this is what readers want as anyone who heard Stefano Hatfield (Editor of thelondonpaper) speak alongside Chris Anderson the other week can testify.
If the aim is to deliver high quality content that readers rely on, perhaps professionally, then the choice of model is more difficult. As Murdoch observes, ‘Quality journalism is not cheap.’ Publishers can either charge readers (Premium or Freemium) or reduce the quality (Free). In practice readers requiring content that can be relied on seek authority and originality and are willing to pay for it eg FT, Economist and WSJ. This was captured succinctly last year by Kevin Kelly who wrote an interesting article ‘Better than free’.
There may be tweets from elections in Iran which are first-hand but do they represent ‘balanced’ thinking or informed opinion? They tell you the ‘what’ but not the ‘why’. In a world where ‘news’ travels faster than ever before, value is created by both immediacy and the supplement of authoritative and original analysis which in turn delivers real insight. Free can deliver immediacy but can it deliver analysis that is authoritative and original?
You can read our view in full at our blog (http://c8blog.canvas8.com/blog/) so feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think.
Thanks.
Tags: anderson, chris, content, facebook, free, freemium, media, murdoch, premium, publishing
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