Temporary Paywall Removals Only Highlight The Fundamental Paradox Of Paywalls
from the backwards-economics dept
While there's room for debate on whether Rupert Murdoch's paywall strategy for the UK Times and Sunday Times has been disastrous or just mediocre, it certainly hasn't been a massive success or reinvented any online news business models. Now we're beginning to see some telling cracks in the facade: the Times paywall recently came down during the Queen's jubilee weekend, and now TNW reports that a similar free-access period is being considered for the 2012 Olympics.
Now, promotional giveaways are hardly a new or crazy idea, and they don't typically say anything bad about a business model—but I don't think that's really what's happening here. Certainly the Times hopes to convert some of those free readers into paid online subscribers, but there's also a clear pattern in the items they choose to make these exceptions for: huge social events that are attended and discussed by lots of people. In other words, precisely the sort of thing where blogs and social media offer the most competition to a newspaper. Why would anybody pay for Olympic reporting when the web is going to be absolutely flooded with constant updates on every little thing that happens, supplied for free by the fans and hangers-on? If the Times content is behind a paywall, it will be all but ignored.
And this really goes to show why, in the long run, paywalls are unsustainable. If the biggest, most popular topics are the hardest to control—and the ones that lose value the most when controlled successfully—while at the same, time social media and citizen reporting output is growing and expanding to new areas constantly, then the inevitable conclusion seems clear: paywalls are, at best, a temporary way of extracting a little bit of cash at the expense of long-term relevance. If your goal is to directly sell news as a product, but you discover that you have to eliminate your prices whenever product demand is highest, something is clearly wrong—you're trying to apply an old model where it doesn't actually fit, and getting kooky results. The solution is not to keep compromising the broken model, but to embrace the underlying realities (infinite content, no barrier to publishing, the huge value of share-ability) that broke it, and build new models around them.
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Filed Under: newspaper, olympics, paywall, rupert murdoch, uk
Companies: news corp
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PayFail
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Not only is the Onion's paywall xenophobic, it's also retarded because it restricts access from countries where the Onion isn't the most popular.
It would make a lot more sense to put a paywall in the USA, where the Onion is most famous and where exposure is less nedded, than in foreign countries where the Onion is less famous, exposure is much more needed, and few people would pay a subscription to begin with.
Oh well... most commercial humor websites go that route. I bet the next one to do this will be cheezburger network. CBN used to be a good website, but now it's filled with PC content and idiots who wrongly think they know and are a part of Internet culture, who spam the comments with absolute 10th grade idiocy and who think a troll is any regular prankster.
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That paywall was good for what???
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Paywalls and Rupert Boondock
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'trying to apply an old model where it doesn't actually fit' is a excellent example of what the movie/music industries are doing but they are then adding into the equation that labeling everyone as a criminal, suing them, bankrupting them and having them imprisoned is going to help their business to survive. some weird ideas around.
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For a limited time, you can enjoy the website for free. It's called a sampling special. The Olympics / Queen's jubilee are key moments, and they can aggregate more audience and show them just how high quality their product is.
Then they can turn back on their membership system (why paywall? Why not "ticket booth" or "smart way to monetize your product"?), and perhaps pick up more subscribers as a result of people having seen just how superior the product is.
I know you hate the idea that anyone has to pay for anything. Try not to let that hatred block your clear view of things. If you can't get something as simple as this right, I can't imagine all the stuff you miss out when you talk about copyright.
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Says the guy who pulled 'hatred' out of his ass. Convincing.
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or "smart way to monetize your product"?),
Simply because it is not a smart way to monetize product, it is however a great way to reduce your readership and therefore your impact and relevance, not to mention negatively affecting what you can make from the advertisers who have traditionally been the way that newspapers have made their money.
But these aren't the darkest days, those are the days when the advertisers finally realise that internet advertising is not less effective than old media advertising but that in fact, old media advertising has never actually been worth the money they paid for it.
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What does it cost to go to an arena when nothing is happening? When there is a basketball game, how much?
These sporting venues and the like have it back asswards.
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No Paywalls
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Donations also rarely suffice to allow you to save money for rough times, so that's not an available option here.
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Paywall Newspapers miss the mark everytime
There are so many alternatives for them to make money if try and apply their brains to how people actually use the net and what they are are actually prepared to spend money on. Rather than trying to bludgeon their users with extraordinary cynicism.
A couple of good articles on the alert.sqwark.me blogs to read on the subject.
Online Advertising fails to deliver; but there is a stunning new approach
New Newspapers of the future
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And the answer is simple: I don't want to pay for news because the quality is not good enough. News give me the basic facts, and frankly even there quality is often poor. Journalists make up stuff completely, or read way too much into the information they have, or just surrender to lobbyists and the government... That's not worth paying for.
On the other hand, journalism, if done right, can be very valuable to society and thus I'd hate to see it disappear.
I don't know which business model newspapers should adopt, but I know this: if they want to stay in the game, they need to get their act straight and offer more quality.
Give me a news source that focuses on news that really matters, that offers very reliable info, and which holds important parties accountable by asking the right questions and exposing the important facts.
We need journalism we can trust and which serves society. And that's something I won't find on social networks or amateur blogs, and I'll be glad to pay for it if only to make sure it keeps existing.
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I like this site
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Once again, it's about the rarities - reputation and interesting/thoughtful/challening opinions are where newspapers of the future can make their mark.
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