Bill Grueskin, former managing editor of WSJ.com, authored two blog posts on Alan Mutter’s Reflections of a Newsosaur over the last few days. The first reveals how and why WSJ.com came to charge for its content in the first place. The second offers his thoughts on how other newspapers could charge for content.
Both are insightful posts given the source and reveal the original decision to charge for WSJ.com was ultimately a case of not knowing any better. However, that discovery is not as revelatory when you consider how little progress has been made on understanding the problem since.
A lot more data on paid subscriptions is needed to really analyze the willingness of customers to pay for both WSJ.com and FT.com and seemingly nothing else. The most interesting data points would be the percentage of corporate subscriptions followed by those determined to be professional versus consumer.
I’ve already written my theory on why professional customers are willing to pay for access to WSJ.com and FT.com and I’m sticking to it until I see more data or become convinced by a more likely argument.
This post looks at the way the debate over the future of professional news content is being approached by all sides regardless of the solutions offered.
All of the news articles and blog posts I’ve read so far have been based on the assumption that all customers are the same. I think realizing that they’re not could be the first step towards testing some possible solutions.
In the second of his two posts Bill raises some interesting points on engagement and Web traffic metrics. He suggests moving away from using unique visitors to measure popularity and using the time users spend on a website to measure engagement.
I think the concept of engagement is important but I interpret its meaning differently. I also think the right Web metrics are important but I interpret their purpose differently.
This is because I think that online people engage with stories rather than specific news brands. The nature of conversations is that there are multiple contributions so it is logical that stories will always be bigger than any one news article however well written and authoritative it is.
It also means that news brands or rather journalists (because people engage with other people) would have lead engagement in stories using all of the tools the Web has brought with it to interact with readers and extend their participation.
Journalists could engage readers all over the Web and build reputations with readers as authoritative sources and trusted news filters that would add to the perceived value of their own original content. Reputations have to be earned with every individual reader either directly or through people they trust.
Attempting to increase the average time users spend on news websites (or any other metric) is focused more on what helps the news website rather than what readers want because it doesn’t account for who readers are. However, Web traffic metrics could be an important tool to start learning about readers and distinguishing between them.
The advertising model that supported traditional media meant news production and its associated costs were always completely divorced from readers. News organizations have never truly known who their readers are and since advertisers valued them all as equally desirable (because they didn’t know who they were either) they were all considered equal.
The interactive nature of the Web enables companies to learn about readers in a way that news stands never have. It would be useful to use Web traffic metrics try to identify which people are already spending the most time on news sites. Who are they? What are they reading? What are they commenting on? What are they sharing and with how many people?
This might provide some knowledge on what these people value the most and guide decision making on finding new sources of revenue regardless of whether it’s paid content or some other service(s).
I am all for experiments but they should be built around the people that value news brands the most. Trying to be everything to everyone and creating experiments in vacuum will significantly reduce the chances of success.
Posted on March 25, 2009
My name is Phillip Baker and this is my personal blog about finding value in a world of free information.