Printed Matters

It’s been a paywall extravaganza for the last two months. I’m seeing signs that it’s coming to an end, so this is a good time to do a round up of all the best arguments.

[I've tried to be careful and consistent with formatting and with dates. This symbol < in the dateline means that I've had to guess at the publication time, and the best I could do was suggest that the article came out sometime before this time. I tried to suss that out using first mention on Twitter.]

December

December 20, 2008 < 8:24 pm
How to save the newspaper industry by Joel Brinkley

Here’s where it all started, two months ago today.

Now, here’s my idea: The newspaper industry should ask the Justice Department for an antitrust exemption that would allow publishers to collaborate on a decision to begin charging for their Web sites. No paper would have to charge, and each paper could determine its own price. But if most papers in a region – San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, for example – began charging for Web access at more or less the same time, many readers would likely subscribe.

Stanford University j-prof Brinkley implicitly understands that unless all news sources start charging at the same time, everyone will just go to the free sources, killing the paid ones quick-fast. So he proposes a government-sanctioned cartel. It’s a theme we’ll see later on with Alan Mutter.

December 21, 2008 – 1:52 pm
Idaho Falls editor’s response to Joel Brinkley’s essay by Roger Plothow

The editor of a paper that has paywalls writes in to tell Brinkley that newspapers can just put up paywalls on their own.

To play devil’s advocate, why should the newspaper industry seek what amounts to a bailout for having made idiotic decisions 10 years ago? Why can’t we just change our business model? Do we really need the protection of the federal government to make this obvious business decision?

December 22, 2008 – 10:51 am
Grasping at Straws by Mark Potts

Recovering Journalist Mark Potts points out that even if all the newspapers banded together, other sources of news would fill the gap.

Newspapers are just part of the picture. Any given local media ecosystem also comprises community papers, alternative papers, business papers, ethnic papers, TV stations, radio stations, blogs, community newsgroups and listservs, Web players (Yelp, Citysearch, craigslist, etc.) and many others….the marketplace is going to shrug and turn elsewhere to find out what’s going on around town, for free.

December 22, 2008 – 2:34 pm
Another round of paid-content nonsense by Steve Yelvington

News/tech dude Yelvington reminds Brinkley that the first news offerings on the web (and even before that, on the Internet) were paywalled.

It didn’t work. In science, this is called empirical data. When data contradicts your theory, guess which one wins?

This is the been there, done that argument.

December 23 2008 – 8:01 am
Are the holidays making people crazy? by Mark Briggs

Briggs gives the first instance in this skirmish of the argument that newspapers have never charged for content, rather delivery of a bundle of paper. This argument gets repeated often, including by me.

Do people pay for a print subscription for access to that news, or for the convenient delivery of a physical product to their doorstep? I think it’s the latter, so applying the print business model to online news is DOA (which has been the case for more than a decade now).

December 30, 2008 – 8:58 pm
The web abhors a vacuum by Tim Burden

Here’s my input, a few days late and a few micropayments short. It says Jan 05 on the post but I wrote it Dec 30, then wrote a better version.

I compare the web to a vacuum, argue that paywalls are anti-web, and reiterate the argument (see Potts above) that paywalls will fail because other news sources will rush in to fill the void.

These publishers would collude to create an information vacuum on the web. And the first little leak – such as an entrepreneur deciding to put advertising-supported news on the web for free – will blow that vacuum wide open. It will instantly destroy the consortium and its business plan.

January

January 11, 2009 – late pm
Let’s Invent an iTunes for News by David Carr

So while Brinkley kicked us off in December with paywalls and a consortium, NYT columnist Carr carries on in January with a micropayment scheme – iTunes for news. He argues that music tried to be free, until Jobs & Co. came along and showed how to keep it as a cash cow.

Is there a way to reverse the broad expectation that information, including content assembled and produced by professionals, should be free? If print wants to perform a cashectomy on users, it should probably look to what happened with music, an industry in which people once paid handsomely for records, then tapes, then CDs, that was overtaken by the expectation that the same product should be free.

January 12, 2009 – 7:49 am
Penny for his thoughts by Jeff Jarvis

Predictably, Jarvis jumps on Carr with both feet. Music is not like news, he says. Music is not ad-supported, news is. And news is not unique, like music is.

But the real fallacy in Carr’s delusion is that a news story or an opinion, like a song, is unique—that you can’t get it somewhere else and so you have to buy the original.

January 12, 2009 – 9:50 pm
An iTunes for news? Dumb, dumb, dumb by Mathew Ingram

Globe columnist and media blogger Ingram tells us iTunes was never about selling music, so newspapers can’t have an iTunes.

Steve Jobs decided to sell music for one reason, and one reason only: to drive the market for iPods. I happen to think that he also wanted to grab the record labels by a sensitive body part and force them to bow to his will, but I have no way of proving that. In any case, there is no corollary for newspapers in this model.

In other words, newspapers aren’t going to pay for the news by selling Kindles.

January 13, 2009 – 3:05 am
Is David Carr a troll? by Pat Thornton

Thornton makes a few arguments, but we’ve seen some of them before. His best one is this: people pay for service, like home delivery. Getting commodity news from a website is not a service, and people won’t pay for it.

Simply charging people to read individual stories on newspaper Web sites is not a service. Newspapers can charge for legitimate, bona fide Web services. But what legitimate services have they ever thought of? If newspapers do start successfully charging for services on their Web sites, I doubt they’ll be news related.

January 13, 2009 – 12:33 pm
Is an ‘iTunes for News’ Possible? by Rich Gordon

Gordon presents a version of the “news ain’t music” argument: news stories don’t get replayed.

When people discover a song they like, they want to hear it over and over again. This was the principle that drove AM radio decades ago, and it drives iTunes today. As much as I love great journalism, it’s awfully rare that I want to read any article more than once.

January 13, 2009 – 5:38 pm
Yet another rebuttal to Carr’s iTunes-for-news notion by Steve Outing

Outing points out what will happen in local markets when a newspaper starts charging for news: free competitors will flourish. Potts and myself already looked at this above, but Outing puts his own spin on it.

For a 1-newspaper town, charging for website access opens you up to new competitors, both entrepreneurs and existing media companies. There are lots of laid-off journalists out there right now, and they won’t all go into PR; some will band together to create alternatives (successors) to the newspaper. The local newspaper charging for access plays right into their hands.

He also expands on the idea that we should charge for service, not content.

January 14, 2009 – 5:03 am
An iTunes model for news? More difficult than you think by Paul Bradshaw

Bradshaw reiterates the three pillars of the “news ain’t music” argument – news is disposible, is not unique, and its revenue model is ad-based – and wraps up with the call to charge for services:

The key point, is that if you are to charge people for news you need to add some value, not just shovel your content online. That’s very very difficult when accessing information is so very very easy.

January 21, 2009 – 11:19 am
Our Plan To Fix The New York Times by Henry Blodget

And the plan is: paywall. Surprised?

Blodget wouldn’t paywall all NYT content, just some. And he says NYT would actually make MORE on advertising, because you can get demographics, which advertisers like. He trots out some numbers to support his case.

In addition, we think the NYT could increase the rates charged for the remaining inventory, perhaps significantly (through having less inventory and more demographic info). We suspect, therefore, that the site’s ad revenue would only drop by about 25% in the plan above, if at all. This would put the online business ahead of where it currently is now. It would also eliminate the incentive of print subscribers to drop their print subscriptions so as to read the paper for free online.

His emphasis.

January 25, 2009 < 9:29 pm
Papers must charge for websites to survive by Gerry Storch

This one started a bit of a Tweet-storm. His argument is basically this:

Information doesn’t want to be free any more than gasoline wants to be free or food wants to be free. When Mr. Schmidt stands in the lobby of the Googleplex and hands out free shares of his company stock, then maybe we can believe the “free” rationale. Until then, papers should charge for what they do so they don’t go out of business. Simple as that.

But food and gas don’t get delivered to my monitor for free like news does. And Google stock is not Google’s product. Oops.

January 29, 2009 – 4:54 pm
More paywall retardedness by Tim Burden

I react to Storch on my own blog, expanding on the idea that content providers are in the business of amassing eyeballs.

As someone once said – I wish I could remember who – never in history has a company amassed a huge audience and then failed to make money from it. That is the business any content provider should be in, despite these incessant squawks to the contrary. And a large audience for news will fail to be amassed if it is hidden in private little walled content gardens.

I’m still looking for the source of the “make money from huge audience” quote. I think it was Murdoch.

February

February 01, 2009 – 1:21 am
10 reasons news sites should not use paywalls by Tim Burden

Looks like I’m getting angry with all this paywall talk. So I come up with a ten-point list of why paywalls are nasty stink. I like to think there’s a logical order to these, so each one builds on the last. My favorite:

Paywalls hurt ad revenue

Follows from above, paywalls reduce readership. Someone will be quick to say, “Oh, but it will be a qualified readership, more valuable.” Bullshit. You can get the same qualification by having users sign up to comment/upload/post on forums etc. There are two types of readers: one hit wonders from Google and locals. Your job is to get locals to participate, not try to squeeze every last dime out of them.

Steve Faguy tries to fisk me point-by-point in his comment, so I fisk his comment right back.

February 03, 2009 – 9:55 pm
NYT Editor Bill Keller Reveals ‘Deadly Serious’ Discussions on Charging for Online – AP

Don’t look now, but NYT editor Keller is saying – wait for it – paywall time, maybe.

“TimesSelect generated something like $10 million a year, which was real money, but in the end the company calculated that we’d be better off taking down the wall and letting the flood of additional visitors to the Web site attract advertising dollars,” Keller said. “The lesson of that experiment, however, was not that readers won’t pay for content.”

February 05, 2009 < 8:00 am
Newspapers must end the free online lunch by Stu Bykofsky

This one makes no actual arguments, but hits every note of sour printie curmudgeonry with such unfailing accuracy, I just had to give it a mention.

I know some say that you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Or, put another way: “I would charge for content even if it kills newspapers, you Internet bastards!”

February 05, 2009 < 8:00 am
How to Save Your Newspaper by Walter Isaacson

Guess how? Yep, paywalls. But there’s a new twist here.

Isaacson says that newspapers traditionally have relied on a “three-legged stool” of revenue: subscriptions, classifieds, and advertising. Any business that relies only on advertising is too beholden to advertisers.

Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula “morally abhorrent” and also “economically self-defeating.” That was because he believed that good journalism required that a publication’s primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue.

February 05, 2009 – 8:22 am
Hey Walter Isaacson—would it kill you to cough up for a NYT subscription? by Bill Wyman

Wyman says we’ve always been on that morally abhorrent one-legged stool:

But papers didn’t make money from subscriptions; the price basically covered the cost of getting multi-pounds of newsprint delivered to your door at 5 a.m. I don’t know what the breakdown for newsstand sales was, but the cost of distribution was high there, too…That leads him down a false logical path.

February 05, 2009 – 1:04 pm
How Not to Save Newspapers by Owen Thomas

Thomas points out that micropayment systems already exist; the problem with micropayment schemes is a psychological one:

The problem with micropayments is not technology. It’s that consumers are fundamentally uninterested in paying per article. Isaacson dismisses the problem of “mental transaction costs,” but it’s quite real. It’s almost impossible to determine the value of an article before you read it. And the amounts we’re talking about — 3 cents? 5 cents? 10 cents? — aren’t worth the time it takes to decide how much one is willing to pay.

February 05, 2009 – 6:08 pm
Keller reacts to Isaacson’s micropayments piece by Jim Romenesko

Keller succinctly nails the problem with any pay model.

Walter [Isaacson] doesn’t really grapple with the main puzzle of a pay model: how to keep it from stifling traffic, especially search-driven traffic, so much that online advertisers go away. I’m not saying that problem is insoluble. Just that, as far as I know, no one has solved it yet.

Either a paywall successfully blocks everyone, including search engines, or it lets robots in and can be easily gamed by everyone else. That is the reality. The only solution is to have special deals to let Google’s spiders in, then close up the walls again. But that, to my mind, would contravene Google’s very own anti-cloaking policy, which forbids a company from serving up one thing to users (a paywall) while serving up something else to spiders (the actual content).

February 05, 2009 – 10:25 pm
Please pay us for our news — please? by Mathew Ingram

I’m not sure who Ingram was arguing against when, like a bully, he kicks and breaks everyone’s tip-jar. But he makes a valuable point. News is worthless once you’ve read it, and people don’t remember or care where they got it.

It has nothing to do with how easy it is for a reader to click a “tipjar” button and drop a few virtual coins. Why should they? For most readers, the daily news is a perishable product of limited value that is here one minute and fish-wrap the next. Not only that, but — despite what many newspapers fervently believe — many people don’t care (and in many cases don’t even know) whether they read a story in your paper, or your competitor’s paper, or heard it on the radio, or saw it on TV, or read it on Perez Hilton or found out from their friend at work.

February 06, 2009 – 10:33 am
NY Times: Please open the TimesSelect books by Jeff Jarvis

Jarvis, tiring of all the talk about paywalls, issues a call to the NYT to let us see the hard, numerical results of its TimeSelect experiment.

We need to get real about specifics in the discussion of business models. I am among those who have been talking in theories and possibilities and I want to see spreadsheets.

February 07, 2009 – 12:20 am
Welcome to the Age-Old Online News Debates by Mark Potts

Potts says to paywalls, “You so old, your birth certificate expired!”

What’s happening is that smart traditional print guys like Osnos and Issacson are turning their brainpower, finally, toward the online world. It’s pretty much all new to them, so they’re having what they think are brilliantly original ideas. Except they aren’t original. Hardly. And because Web-news oldtimers have debated and tried them before, often multiple times, we tend to think (insert heavy sigh): “Been there, done that.” Hence the criticism.

February 08, 2009 – 7:37 pm
Paying a little by Mark Hamilton

Three points: any micropayment system would need to be one sign-up for all the stuff I read; would have to include non-mainstream sources like blogs and Twitter; and you don’t know what the value of something is until after you read it.

Sounds like an argument for an ISP tax to me. Seriously. You pay a little extra each month to your Internet provider, which goes into a big fund which then gets distributed according to what users actually use. I’m surprised this hasn’t come up in this round of discussions. It’s at least as viable (and unpalatable) as a paywall. And it seems to solve each of Hamilton’s “stumbling blocks.”

…the fact that I visit a web page does not mean that it has value to me. The value is only established after I’ve read/see what’s there. How often will I be willing to pay (even if it’s being measured in tenths of pennies) for the right to look at a page without knowing the potential value of what I’ll find there?

February 08, 2009 – 8:00 pm
Mission possible? Charging for web content by Alan Mutter

Mutter calls the act of giving away content an “Original Sin”. Basically, he says newspapers must put up paywalls or die.

The Original Sin among most (but not all) publishers was permitting their content be consumed for free on the web. Now that ad sales are about as low as the belly of the snake who caused the mischief in the Garden of Eden, a growing number of us have concluded that consumers are either going to have to start paying for professionally generated content or there won’t much of it left.

It was a two-parter, so most of us waited for the next part to pounce on Mutter. But not Howard Owens. He jumped right in with a great, angry comment:

There is no historical mistake in newspaper having given content away for free online. It was inevitable and unavoidable. It’s also well documented that newspaper readers have NEVER paid for content. As Walter Lippmann pointed out in 1922, news readers have NEVER wanted to pay much for news, as little as possible in fact, and free being better. Suburban home delivery became expensive for consumers, and they only put up with it because they were held hostage by lack of alternatives for written-word news.

February 09, 2009 – 12:44 am
Why Steve Jobs and micropayments won’t save the media by Gabriel Sherman

News ain’t music. Plus:

To replicate the old print model in which newspapers retained pricing power and content remained scarce, all major news organizations would have to adopt the micropayment model en masse. And that would spark cries of collusion. It’s not the lack of a cool device that’s killing the newspaper industry—it’s that competition and consumer tastes have undermined their competitive position. No device or download service will change that.

February 09, 2009 – 9:11 am
How Micropayments Can Work by Paul Gillin

Music was almost Napsterized, says Gillin, but look, a decent micropayment system pulled them back from the brink. Maybe it’s not too late for news to do the same? And it’s up to journalists!

The only way a micropayment model can flourish is if individual journalists carry the flag. It’s up to reporters and the emerging breed of online news organizations like Talking Points Memo to convince their fans to fork over a few pennies to consume their stuff. Perhaps these organizations can steal a lesson from the music industry by giving away their content free on their website but charging for downloads to a Kindle. If readers perceive the value, they’ll pay.

February 09, 2009 – 12:02 pm
Can journalism go with the flow? by Jeff Jarvis

Paywalls are anti-web:

…experience just tells us that it’s hard to charge for content, that charging brings other costs (subscriber acquisition marketing, customer service, churn), that it has other impact (draining Googlejuice and online branding and taking the content out of the conversation), that there is always another competitor who will offer content for free, and that once information is know, it becomes a commodity. See: TimesSelect. Charging is definitely a case of swimming upstream.

February 09, 2009 – 12:34 pm
Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers by Clay Shirky

Shirky thought this argument was so important, he started a whole new blog just for it. Yep, he’s got a blog with exactly one post on it. But it’s a good one.

The essential thing to understand about small payments is that users don’t like being nickel-and-dimed. We have the phrase ‘nickel-and-dimed’ because this dislike is both general and strong. The result is that small payment systems don’t survive contact with online markets, because we express our hatred of small payments by switching to alternatives, whether supported by subscription or subsidy.

February 09, 2009 – 12:41 pm
How to really save your newspaper by Jason Preston

A variation on paywalls, that Preston has been pushing for a while. But it’s still a paywall, at heart, with all the same issues. I think Preston thinks that by straddling the paywall just right, he can have his cake and eat it too. It’s still a paywall, though, and either it blocks spiders or is trivially gamed.

There’s also a perverse little point of economics in favor of this strategy: any club that is sufficiently exclusive becomes more attractive to those who are not members. Creating a “top tier” of reader is a great way to get people to drop a little cash, just so they can be in the know.

February 09, 2009 8:30 pm
How to charge for content. Theoretically. by Alan Mutter

Paywall. And a cartel. Sigh. Back where we were two months ago.

The other gotcha is that content would have to be secured so that someone who bought it could not turn around and provide it to a friend or, worse, publish it to the web in defiance of UN-SIN. Although this is a non-trivial technical problem, it already has been solved reasonably well by a number of companies.

No it hasn’t. And it never will. He says one company solved it but everyone was too stupid to buy it. Right.

I headed one such company, called SealedMedia, until the tech bust in 2001. Our technology was awesome, our system was effective and it was priced to appeal to even the thriftiest client. But only a handful of publishers were smart enough to put a priority on getting paid for their content. Today, they are doing quite well. So, I know this can work.

Sorry, Alan, never heard of them. Maybe we would have if all those publishers weren’t so stupid.

February 10, 2009 – 9:47 am
Paying for the news: A link-a-thon by Mathew Ingram

Hey, that’s a lot like this link-a-thon. But mine’s different.

I told Mathew he should charge for the service. I’m going to give him a dime when I see him at PodCamp this weekend.

February 10, 2009 < 5:47 pm
Forget Micropayments — Here’s a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content by Steve Outing

Now that we’re getting to the end of the two-month paywall fest, we’re starting to get new ideas instead of the old regurgitated fare.

At first I thought Outing’s idea was stupid, because Kachingle is such a stupid name. But then I thought, hey, it’s not a paywall. And I can vote with my dollars. It’s like Stumble or Digg, but with money!

Then Mathew Ingram informed me on Twitter: been there, done that. Flooz. Beenz. He’s right. This can’t scale.

Anyway, it’s not a paywall. So that’s good. But there’s a great anti-paywall argument buried in there:

A significant problem with micropayments is that it walls off content and makes it difficult to share with others and spread it around the Web. If I like an article and promote it in one of my Twitter posts, many of the people will not read it if they encounter a pay demand even for 5 cents; it’s a barrier that will turn many away, especially if to get to the article the prospective user first has to sign up for some content payment network account. If I’ve paid 5 cents to read an article and want to promote it to my social network friends or followers, will the URL that I share even work?

February 11, 2009 – 3:51 pm
Why I dislike micropayments, don’t mind charity, but really have a better idea by Josh Young

Another new idea. You know a subject has run its course (and done its job!) when the new ideas start cropping up. And we’re almost ready to wrap.

Young suggests that what journalists have that they can monetize is trust. And they can monetize that trust by charging for privileged access to themselves.

Note the elegant fit: increased interaction between one person and another is what fosters relationships and trust. Giving paying users otherwise exclusive twitter access to the creator could work. SMS updates could work, as could a permission only room on friendfeed. Even something as simple as a gold star on paying users’ comments—a symbol that they support the creator financially—would provide incentive for the creator to reply. Tiers of stars—bronze, silver, gold—are possible too.

February 18, 2009 – 1:35 pm
What Would Micropayments Do for Journalism? A Freakonomics Quorum by Stephen J. Dubner

All our favourite antagonists and protagonists, in one freaky show.

But there’s one new voice here, that of MIT professor Marshall Van Alstyne, who comes up with a better analogy than my vacuum:

Putting micropayments on news is like putting tollbooths on an open ocean. Internet users, awash in a sea of information, will avoid new barriers by navigating around them. And frankly, the interests of a free society are rarely served by building barriers between the people and their news.

February 18, 2009 – 7:33 pm
Not All Information Wants To Be Free by Jack Schafer

Schafer says some content is worth paying for, and comes up with a tri-partite list:

Not all successful paid sites are alike, but they all share at least one of these attributes: 1) They are so amazing as to be irreplaceable. 2) They are beautifully designed and executed and extremely easy to use. 3) They are stupendously authoritative.

He then goes on, correctly, to suggest that the place to pay for this content is outside the web. Paywalls are anti-web, in my opinion, so if you’re going to pay for content, do it outside the web. (Still on the Internet, mind you, but outside the web. Important distinction.)

That iTunes is a free-standing application and not contained inside a browser, as is the Amazon music store, is not accidental, and I reckon that its “outside the browser” design has played some role in its success. Consumers have been conditioned to think that content delivered by a browser is supposed to be free. They get annoyed when they encounter a pay wall on a browser but are more psychologically open to the nonbrowser Web interface.

February 19, 2009 – 9:40 am
The micropayment debate continues by Mathew Ingram

And we end this two-month paywall-fest with Matt Ingram.

Will any of these solutions make the difference in an industry whose old business model is being disrupted by a new medium, and may never be the same? Will someone try to put tollbooths on the ocean and actually make it work? Or will we still be having these arguments 10 years from now? I wish I knew.

February 20, 2009 < 11:00 am
Wasting Ink, Beating a Dead Horse by Vin Crosbie

Wait, one more today from Vin Crosbie. Now that’s it! It stops here!

Attempts to get people to pay, micropay, endow, or otherwise subsidize the traditional generic editions in an era when people have so many better choices is simply beating a dead horse. No amount of ink is going to bring it back to life.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS