Chris Anderson’s written a book about it, Umair Haque’s written lots of manifesto’s and posts about it, and Fred Wilson’s written countless blog posts about it. It is radical and new business models (from free to freemium to radical pricing and value) and it’s use in the digital and real world.
So when I heard that Rupert Murdoch’s going to start charging for content on the News Corp sites, I first though, “wa hey, readership of tabloids online goes down” but then I thought hmmm… is there more to this?
So I decided to ask via twitter what Chris, Fred and Umair thought about it.
Chris had already commented on twitter that he thought this was just the freemium model that was already employed by the WSJ – my bad, time difference between West Coast USA and Switzerland means tweets get missed. Umair wrote via twitter that:
“@farhanlalji, 1. nobody’s gonna pay 2. rupert’s reaping decades of underinvestment in real journalism 3. send him the nichepaper manifesto.”
Fred wrote a full out blog post, a key point was around experimentation:
“But there’s more than one revenue model for online content. Clearly advertising is going to be part of all of them. For some, advertising is enough. I’m close to several niche online properties who are making money with an “ad only” model. It works for some. For others, a subscription model will have to be used to supplement ad revenue. And so I am eager to see what News Corp comes up with.”
I’m still not convinced that this will work, the WSJ and FT have great content, so people read them. In fact the FT has a subscription and ads, but the content’s so good that I don’t mind (although I acknowledge that some people do) . I don’t know if the same model will work for the Post and the other papers in the News Corp portfolio. There’s just too much competition in that segment of journalism.
So I agree with Umair that Rupert hasn’t invested enough in journalism to reap the rewards of paid subscription for content models. But I also agree with Fred that experimentation is a good thing. I really liked and agreed with the title of Fred’s post, “Let’s get on with it”, true.
