How to make readers pay for news: In itself, this deterioration explains the rehabilitation of the paid-for content idea. Fact is : advertising doesn’t work as expected for news websites. Everywhere in the world, volumes dropped (that’s the recession part). But more worrisome, prices dropped as well (consensus is around minus 30% over the last 18 months), with a “ratchet effect” that will make it difficult for prices to come back to the pre-crisis level. Google bears some responsibility in this state of affairs: it forced a large chunk of the advertising market to shift to text-ads. [...]Let’s summarize the key components of a modern paid-for system for news sites:
* Single sign-on system.
* Diversity of models.
* A unified, “Friction free” micropayment system.
* A cross media brands consolidation system.
* A database system.
* Flexibility in pay-wall options.
* Ability to decide the criteria upon which some readers will be charged while others won’t.
* Search engine management.
* (Most probably) An advertising management system.
* Integration of mobile terminals.
Statistical evidence: many newspaper execs not seeing reality: 75% of newspaper execs believe that if their content were no longer available on their website, online users would foremost turn to the print edition of the newspaper. Meanwhile, only 30% of online news users said they would turn to the print edition in such a case; the No. 1 choice (at 68% of respondents to a 2009 Belden survey) was to look to “other local media sites.”
Lots of data to mull on charging for online content:
— In nearly all markets, newspaper websites receive 2.5 visits and 10 pageviews for each unique visitor.
— “Core loyalists,” who visit a newspaper 2-3 times a day for 20 days a month, comprise 25% of unique visitors. Not surprisingly, then, core loyalists account for 86% of pageviews and are “overwhelmingly local.”
— Seventy percent of core loyalists online are also readers of the print edition (meaning they subscribe or they picked up a copy in the past seven days).
