Russell Brown wrote a nice piece after the NBR’s decision to charge for some of its content and posted video of the subsequent discussion he had on Media7 with publisher Barry Colman.
That video is below, along with a Nieman Lab video interview with Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal, which seems to work well in juxtaposition.
Murray says the WSJ has learned that having a paywall doesn’t mean everything has to be behind it. He says it’s a mistake to put your most popular content behind the paywall; instead your most popular content should be used to drive traffic to the site.
The content to put behind your paywall is the stuff that a particular group of people feel really passionate about or are really interested in or really need. In the WSJ’s case it’s business readers who need the information it has to offer. For another paper it might be people empassioned by local sports.
His view chimes with Colman’s point that the NBR hopes to build its subscriber base over time by charging for content that may not appeal to everyone but means a great deal to the people who are interested in it.
Alan’s five main points are summarised on this Nieman Lab post. Here’s a couple of them:
Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches. It may be easier to identify those opportunities with financial news, but Murray suggested, for instance, that a local newspaper could consider charging for coverage of high school sports. “To the people who want to read it,” he said, “they really want to read it because maybe their kids are involved. Maybe they’re willing to pay for that or maybe there’s a photography service that’s connected to that where you can download pictures of your kids or of the game. But only if you’re a subscriber.”
The narrower the niche, perhaps the better. This was the bit of news in our interview: The Journal is planning what Murray called a “premium initiative” to sell “narrower information services” at a higher subscription rate to subsets of its readership. He was coy about what services will be offered but mentioned, as examples, energy coverage and some sort of news service for chief financial officers.
Kachingle: the case for a massive web-wide tip jar
What works for niche business sites, of course, may not work for bog standard daily news sites who have a harder row to hoe when it comes to getting people to fork out for their content online.
Newspaper executives … have to grasp the notion that few publishers will be able to get very many people to pay for their content specifically. The Wall Street Journal Online can do it, because many of its paid online subscribers are businesspeople who can charge the subscription bill to their expense accounts. Most other newspapers will only be able to charge online users directly for truly premium content that is not replicated somewhere else — for example, e-books and other high-value content that’s not typical newspaper fare.
That’s from Steve Outing in an Editor & Pubisher post about a new web-wide payment service called Kachingle, which may or may not offer some hope for news sites and bloggers alike.
Kachingle is like a massive web-wide tip jar. The idea is a reader voluntarily takes an account and pays a monthly subscription for a self-selected amount. They can then direct their Kachingle money to support those sites they most enjoy by clicking on the Kachingle button on the sites when they visit.
Think a handful of earnest readers pitching in $5 a month and it doesn’t seem like much of an idea, but think millions of readers pitching in $50 to $100 a month and you’re starting to get somewhere.
It’s hard to know whether it could ever catch on, not least because it requires a lot of people to make the effort to register for a Kachingle account in the first place and remember to click the Kachingle buttons when they see them.
In a separate post Steve spoke to Dr BJ Fogg, a Stanford University psychologist who investigates how technology persuades people, about this and other ways to get people to pay online.
He said Fogg’s view is that the Kachingle model “tries to get the online user to “do the right thing” by financially supporting free online news and content, then sharing that information with friends in hopes of influencing their behavior. He likens it to the psychology at a charity auction, where people are influenced to bid when seeing their friends and peers bidding.
“But Fogg expects that if 100 people on your social networks see that you have supported a Web site via Kachingle, only one or two of them might be inspired to sign up themselves. So he’s not sure how much money the service can bring in.”
One point that Steve made in his preamble resonated with me. It’s something I think about whenever I think about paying for news online as a consumer. Namely that I’ve become accustomed to getting news and information from a wide range of sources. While I’m happy to pay for content, I don’t want to pay a subscription to all of these sources because it would be too expensive and fiddly and I only read a handful of stories a day, week or month from any one source.
Steve puts it thus:
The online news consumer samples many brands, from the New York Times to Joe’s Blog. Most online users visit many Web sites on a typical day, bouncing around the world of free content. They’ll have a few media brands and bloggers that they visit regularly, but they also encounter new ones frequently, via the serendipitous link spotted when reading something from a known media brand, to the recommendation of a friend on Facebook or Twitter or e-mail. Your once-powerful newspaper brand doesn’t mean as much as it used to, and to get paid for newspaper content online, it must become part of a giant pool of content that’s financially supported en masse.
Think of it this way and you’ll understand the core concept behind Kachingle: Just as online users currently pay an Internet provider $30 or more a month for their computers to access the Internet, and perhaps a monthly fee for all the music they want from a service like Rhapsody, they’ll also pay a monthly fee for all the newsand blog content on the Web. Only the last fee is voluntary, and it will be up to publishers to educate the public on the importance of paying for content online. (National Public Radio has been doing this for itself for decades. Now commercial news publishers and bloggers need to do it to benefit all of them, not just one entity.)
Here are a few of the specifics from Steve’s post:
* When the service starts in beta, the monthly default fee will be $5, but ultimately you’ll be able to set whatever amount you wish. You might decide that all the content you read on media sites and blogs for “free” is worth $1 a month because that’s all you can afford, or perhaps you can give $100 a month. It’s your decision, in the same way you decide how much you give to National Public Radio stations during their regular pledge drives.
* You can ignore Kachingle’s plea for you to pay a monthly fee for online news and blog content, just as you can choose to send nothing to the NPR station but still listen to it. You will be able to see any free content on any site that has a Kachingle medallion.
* If you are a paying Kachingle account holder, you’ll sign in once per device (PC, laptop, smart phone) and be remembered. So anytime you visit a site that uses Kachingle, the Kachingle medallion will recognize you.
* As a Kachingle account holder, when you visit, say, NYTimes.com, the Kachingle medallion on its pages will ask if you’d like to support the site. If you do, you’ll click the support button on the medallion, which means that some of the monthly fee you pay Kachingle will go to NYTimes.com. That site will always remember that you support it, but the medallion will allow you to rescind support with one click.
* You’ll see Kachingle medallions on lots of sites (in theory). Click to support the ones you like, or don’t, as you visit them. You may end up with, say, three newspaper Web sites, one magazine site, and 30 blogs that you want to support; at each of those you would have clicked the Kachingle support button once.
* Now what happens is that Kachingle tracks your Web site and blog visits over the month. If you visited NYTimes.com 30 times, Editorandpublisher.com 10 times, and the blog SteveOuting.com 10 times (but none of the other sites that you support), then NYTimes.com would get 60% of your monthly Kachingle fee, and Editorandpublisher.com and my blog would get 20% each. In other words, the money you spend on your monthly Kachingle account is allotted by how often you visit the sites you support, rather than every site you support getting an even split of your money.
All Evolving Newsroom
Wrap: paywalls, NBR, WSJ, Kachingle
Paywalls, the NBR and the WSJ
Russell Brown wrote a nice piece after the NBR’s decision to charge for some of its content and posted video of the subsequent discussion he had on Media7 with publisher Barry Colman.
That video is below, along with a Nieman Lab video interview with Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal, which seems to work well in juxtaposition.
Murray says the WSJ has learned that having a paywall doesn’t mean everything has to be behind it. He says it’s a mistake to put your most popular content behind the paywall; instead your most popular content should be used to drive traffic to the site.
The content to put behind your paywall is the stuff that a particular group of people feel really passionate about or are really interested in or really need. In the WSJ’s case it’s business readers who need the information it has to offer. For another paper it might be people empassioned by local sports.
His view chimes with Colman’s point that the NBR hopes to build its subscriber base over time by charging for content that may not appeal to everyone but means a great deal to the people who are interested in it.
Alan Murray of The Wall Street Journal on charging for content from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.
Alan’s five main points are summarised on this Nieman Lab post. Here’s a couple of them:
Kachingle: the case for a massive web-wide tip jar
What works for niche business sites, of course, may not work for bog standard daily news sites who have a harder row to hoe when it comes to getting people to fork out for their content online.
That’s from Steve Outing in an Editor & Pubisher post about a new web-wide payment service called Kachingle, which may or may not offer some hope for news sites and bloggers alike.
Kachingle is like a massive web-wide tip jar. The idea is a reader voluntarily takes an account and pays a monthly subscription for a self-selected amount. They can then direct their Kachingle money to support those sites they most enjoy by clicking on the Kachingle button on the sites when they visit.
Think a handful of earnest readers pitching in $5 a month and it doesn’t seem like much of an idea, but think millions of readers pitching in $50 to $100 a month and you’re starting to get somewhere.
It’s hard to know whether it could ever catch on, not least because it requires a lot of people to make the effort to register for a Kachingle account in the first place and remember to click the Kachingle buttons when they see them.
In a separate post Steve spoke to Dr BJ Fogg, a Stanford University psychologist who investigates how technology persuades people, about this and other ways to get people to pay online.
He said Fogg’s view is that the Kachingle model “tries to get the online user to “do the right thing” by financially supporting free online news and content, then sharing that information with friends in hopes of influencing their behavior. He likens it to the psychology at a charity auction, where people are influenced to bid when seeing their friends and peers bidding.
“But Fogg expects that if 100 people on your social networks see that you have supported a Web site via Kachingle, only one or two of them might be inspired to sign up themselves. So he’s not sure how much money the service can bring in.”
One point that Steve made in his preamble resonated with me. It’s something I think about whenever I think about paying for news online as a consumer. Namely that I’ve become accustomed to getting news and information from a wide range of sources. While I’m happy to pay for content, I don’t want to pay a subscription to all of these sources because it would be too expensive and fiddly and I only read a handful of stories a day, week or month from any one source.
Steve puts it thus:
Here are a few of the specifics from Steve’s post:
Much more about this on Steve’s post.