Publishers are slowly — very slowly — inching their way toward the paid model. The fact is, over time online traffic by non-locals, which usually comes through search engines, doesn’t help their advertisers. Here’s the latest from Jim Moroney:
A.H. Belo is considering models for charging for some of its Web content and plans to implement a pay wall within six months at either the Morning News, Rhode Island’s Providence Journal or Riverside Press-Enterprise, published in Riverside, California, Moroney said. That may require Web readers to go directly to the newspaper’s site to read stories, he said.
“This is traffic that’s not being monetized to any great degree,” Moroney said. “It’s akin to a person who drops into town, buys one copy of your newspaper and leaves town again and yet you spend a whole bunch of time building your business around that type of customer.”
11 comments
Unless they are going to depend less on syndication and AP articles, and create unique content, it won’t make a difference in their site traffic. I can read an AP report anywhere, but locally produced content is almost extinct.
There are so many red herrings in this post and that story it’s a wonder where one begins.
The gist of this (ongoing) story is the WSJ and a few others that are considering blocking Google from indexing inside their paid-stories wall for extract-display on Google News. Then, the DMN and the Denver Post get mixed in about putting up pay walls (that do not exist now) for their content. Two DIFFERENT things.
Moroney said nothing about the DMN blocking Google indexing for sure. In fact, blocking Google indexing will just allow readers to link to OTHER news sites to get a story, not from the DMN, or the WSJ, for example. So who loses there?
Moroney complains about a lack of monetizing traffic because of free-link reading. Well, he’s ignoring the elephant in the room, which is ad-blocking browser plug-ins. I have not seen an ad on D, or the DMN, or WSJ, or PegNews or “where ever” for about 4 years now. And, I can assure Mr. Moroney, once he pulls his parochial head from his butt, that there are hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of others operating in the exact same way.
The DMN site, since it’s operation was taken over by IBM outsourcing a number of years ago, is so woefully inadequate that adding a pay wall, or blocking Google indexing (pay wall or no pay wall) would be just another nail in their digital coffin.
I think this just may work, but they’re going to have to pour that revenue into more and more local stories online to add value to it.
A couple of reasons
1 – People still need and want local news. A site or two may give away local news for free, but the DMN is still the news source of record for that area. It seems that with most local news, the paper reports and TV stations follow up on it. The only difference here is in the instance of fires, wrecks and robberies where instant, but generally unimportant news gets immediate coverage but fizzles.
But in cases like the Cowboys practice facility collapse, the DMN owned it and those stories were of immense value. I, like thousands of others, got it absolutely free. All the DMN got as a result was a few pageviews from me and probably not a dime of revenue.
2 – The cost per reader will not increase with Web visitors, but revenue will. If a newspaper goes from 100 paying subscribers to 1000 paying subscribers, there is an increase in production costs. If a Web site goes from 100 paying subscribers to 1000 paying subscribers, the production cost increase is nil, but the revenue and profit still increases ten fold.
3 – A few days ago there was a report where some 80 percent of people said they wouldn’t pay for news online. I call shenanigans. When gas skyrocketed to $4/gallon a year and a half ago there were all these people saying they’d drive less bla bla bla. I took public transit for a little while and it sucked. Now I drive again and I paid $3/gallon the other day. If I value news and information like I do driving and someone asks me to pay for it, I’m going to eventually.
But to make this work, DallasNews is going to have to provide value in their stories. They’re not going to be able to charge for movie reviews or generic Cowboys content, I can get that anywhere. They are absolutely going to have to provide news to Dallas residents that they truly can get no where else. They have to OWN local news and sports. And when they do they’re going to have to make sure that it doesn’t go far for free. (There will be some copyright infringement, there always is.)
And once they have detailed subscriber data, they’re going to be able to target advertisers and audience more effectively. They’ll be able to geo-target to zip codes (if they don’t already) based on a subscribers billing information and sell more ads and open up the DMN to a more diverse group of advertisers. How? Google tells me Dallas has 200 zip codes. If I am a small advertiser, like a restaurant with delivery and I only want to advertise to 5 of those zip codes, I can’t necessarily do it on DallasNews.com right now. But if the DMN gave me the option to advertise online to just subscribers in those 5 zip codes for 10% of the normal cost of a site-wide advertisement, I just might do it. Empower hundreds of local advertisers to target ads and you increase the value of those ads and the revenue associated with it.
Okay, I’ll stop rambling now, but I think it can work.
This seems like trying to put a genie back in the bottle. If, say, DMN starts making me pay for content, whats to keep me from going to Channnel 5’s site. Then say all the networks and major print media begin to charge, why would I then not take my chances with an upstart like pegasus news. If print media wants to survive as “Print media” then stop putting non wire articles and editorials online altogether. A “print media” website should be for blogs, breaking news, and most of all, teasing the printed articles in a manner that makes you want to subscribe to the print product.
It would have worked before they cut newsroom staff multiple times to control costs. There will need to be a significant effort to hire more reporters and editors before making the print or online product worth paying for again.
I agree with Billusa99 completely with only one added comment, sooner or later advertisers will also pull their heads from their parochial butts and realize that much of their paid effort to date has been wasted.
Online sources will be forced to require payment proportional to requiring their visitors to disable adblocking software, much as sites require enabling Javascript to make navigation possible. We may be in for more of a multi-sided freeforall than just simply trying to charge for content.
They’ve got it all wrong. If anyone, including local readers want to find an article from the DMN online, you have to Google it. The DMN search engine is a farce and the employees themselves will tell you so.
Is Moroney saying that when frontburner links to his content, that doesn’t help him? Because I think it does. I also think that unless the News kanoodles with the Star-Telegram and they both put up a pay wall simultaneously, the News will suffer badly. As for me: I’ll miss reading dallasnews.com, which I do daily (from Austin), and I’ll miss linking to Terry Maxon’s excellent airplane stories, but I’ll have to stop if the wall goes up.
if we pay will they improve their idiotic search capabilities?
have they forgotten that they now have an audience that extends beyond the North Texas geographic region? have they forgotten that they now reach readers around the world?
they need to keep those readers in mind. give me a flat rate subscription price that will give me access to lots of content. I subscribe online to the WSJ because they provide me with access to lots of content. the DMN’s archive functionality is stupid and limited
Jimmy Three-Sticks needs to check out the Long Tail Theory and see how he can use that to his advantage
Memo to Belo: The horse has left the barn.
Absent creating a monopoly on local news, no one needs to read the DMN to find out what’s going on, because they can go to Frontburner, to the TV web sites, to KRLD, to Pegasus, et al. just as easily. Maybe there truly is an untapped audience willing to pay just to read Steve Blow, but I don’t see it.
Nothing the News does any more is worth paying on a per article basis. Nothing.
they’re only about a decade late, but i still think it can work