So, Rupert Murdoch has declared that News International sites will all start charging for content by next summer. What he actually said was he was satisfied that News International could produce “significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content”, that “we intend to charge for all our news websites” and “make our content better and differentiate it from other people”.
He hasn’t got where he is by announcing his plans in advance and I don’t think this announcement is an exception. It signals an intention but says nothing about the plans. He talks broadly – as most commentators also do – of “content”, when he fully understands the substantial differences between news, comment, reviews, features, serialised fiction, crosswords, recipes, agony aunt columns, … And what does “charge for a website” mean? He knows that clumsy, broad paywalls are a non-starter.
For any pay-to-view charging system to succeed it’s going to have to be sophisticated in its pricing and completely painless for the user. The overwhelming consensus is that no-one’s going to pay for news which is abundant elsewhere and not sufficiently differentiable. Some argue that comment and analysis have sufficient value, but the only proven cases are for business-critical content (Wall Street Journal and Financial Times). The only one sure way you’re going to get people to pay to view is to provide content that is either unique or otherwise unavailable for free elsewhere.
But there’s another way to differentiate your content – to create value – and that’s in the packaging.
Back in 2001 News International introduced charges for its crossword on Times Online, with a £10 annual fee; that’s now not just crosswords online but the Crossword Club, giving access to more than 9,000 puzzles and a host of member benefits – for £4.95 a month or £12.95 a year. That may be generating small beer for the Times, but it is based on just a tiny fraction of the the Times’ content. There are plenty more examples like this where news sites are already generating revenue from their content – but most commentators seem completely blind to them.
There’s no end to the number of packages, large and small, that news publishers could dream up, serving particular niches, and most will have a far higher perceived value than the simple online delivery of their base content.
