I saw a blurb on my friend Gary’s website this morning that I thought was smart, and I’d like to add my take on it.
It was an article at Portfolio that started like this:
Yesterday, over a very tasty seafood lunch, I watched Felix Salmon spend two hours trying to convince FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw to abandon his newspaper’s attempts to get its readers to pay for online content. He did not succeed.
Currently, FT.com has a hybrid model whereby readers are able to view a set number of articles for free each month but required to register and then to subscribe if they wish to exceed that ration. Felix hates this model because he believes it gets the incentives all wrong: Any reader who understands the model and doesn’t wish to subscribe will be careful only to click on stories that he absolutely must read, thus depriving FT of page views and ad revenue.
This is the same discussion going on inside my own company. Jeff Bercovici goes on to make a novel suggestion, but he’s unsure of where he’s going with it.
As you browse FT.com, you have a small status bar at the bottom of your screen, akin to the “life bar” in first-person shooter games that shows you how healthy or injured your character is. In this case, the status bar shows you how many free page views you have left. Now here’s the fun part: If you want to exceed your quota but you don’t want to pay, there are other ways. In video games, you can usually replenish your life bar by collecting floating gold coins or stars or mushrooms or what have you; why not do the same on a newspaper site?
I’m not sure about the mushrooms, but the general idea is brilliant. My take on it would be slightly more interactive. As you click around the site, and you notice your X number of free pages starting to wane, you can replenish by doing one of the following:
- Email a story to a friend would give you one additional page view (each time).
- Tweet out the story and earn 3 extra page views.
- Post it to your Facebook page and earn 5 additional page views.
- Link to a story from your blog and get unlimited page views for 3 days.
Bercovici goes on to add one more level which I also agree with, rewarding your best customers with specials.
Free admission to FT conferences, lunch with an FT writer, and so on.
That type of reward could also be built into the equation somehow. Obviously this sort of thing would take some additional work on the website infrastructure, but so does a pay wall.
I think I just found my next cause to start pushing at work.
That IS a novel idea that seems like it would go far for inducing participation. I don’t know if I personally would do it, though, at this point in time. Occasionally I’ll run into pages that prompt me to do something extra to get an additional story or feature or something, and I’m very rarely interested in doing so. The idea of browsing news at work is having as little time and effort expended as possible, and if I have to jump through a hoop to continue my reading, commenting, what have you, I’ll usually look for my content elsewhere.
As more online venues move to a pay wall model, though, this model would stand head and shoulders above the rest.
Adding gaming to your login to access additional features? I think it’ll work for major papers and for readers’ hometown papers. For instance, I’m registered for the New York Times and the Washington Post because I read their articles regularly (and I have a Sunday subscription to the Times, which gets me behind the pay wall). And I recently registered for the News & Observer here in N.C., because it’s my local paper and I care about Triangle news.
But this share-us-to-get-access approach wouldn’t work when people wants to read a one-off article. Sometimes I’ll get a link to an article in a small or medium-sized paper somewhere else in the country, only to run into a (free) registration page. That’s annoying — I’m only there to read the single article, not to create an ongoing relationship with the paper. I might check if BugMeNot.com has a working login but if I can’t access it in under a minute, I’ll abandon the site.
I like the idea of offering special bonuses, like how Seth Godin gave free access to a live event if you bought three copies of Tribes (and then readers suddenly had two extra copies to give away to friends).
Joshua & Karl – I agree that sharing needs to be encouraged All the McClatchy newspapers have a threshold that allows each paper to set how many pages you can view before you get the registration page, I believe the lowest I saw that set was at 10 pages for the Fresno Bee, which even at 10 a one-time visitor should be fine.
The idea of a hard pay wall like at the NY Times is a stickier wicket. I do remember that when the NYT’s first tried the pay wall, you could get around it by following a link the Google using the “first click free” program.
I’m not an expert on the newspaper industry, but it seems like they’ve been trying and failing to monetize electronic content for at least 15 years. I remember using the Washington Post‘s “Digital Ink” dialup online service to access articles at my middle school library in 1995 or 1996. It was the Post’s clunky attempt at creating a pre-Web paid service, which seemed cool at the time.
Apparently, the paper spent millions of dollars on Digital Ink but never attracted more than 10,000 subscribers: “When Digital Ink finally came on line [in the summer of 1995], subscribers had to crawl across the electronic equivalent of miles of broken glass to get anywhere. Logging on could take more than five minutes, and moving from screen to screen could take minutes, not seconds–all of which added dollars to annoyed subscribers’ bills.”
I don’t claim to have the solution but I suspect it involves segmenting readers (aka “customers”). Some heavy users are willing to pay a premium for full access. Others might do pay-as-you-go if there’s an seamless, iTunes-like micropayment system. A huge chunk of people will never pay anything, and you have to monetize that some other way.