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By Marta Wohrle
You know how it gets. Once you are conscious of being thirsty, it’s hard to get your thoughts away from a cool drink (or even a stiff one). If you are hungry, images of hamburgers can become all-consuming. In a recession, the mind turns to revenue, and the scarcer it is, the more fanciful one’s thinking can get.
The idea of online subscriptions or some kind of payment for content has started to shimmer before fevered and worried media moguls like a mirage in the desert. In March, Time Inc. hinted that it would start some controlled experiments with paid content. Sports Illustrated and EW were named.
Time Inc. isn’t the only one. The idea that consumers should be coughing up has been preying on many more media minds. Speaking at a cable television event in Washington, Rupert Murdoch said: "People are used to reading everything on the ’Net for free, and that's going to have to change.” He added that online advertising simply can no longer cover the costs associated with double-digit revenue declines in print advertising. Yes, the business model isn’t working anymore. But—and I hate to sound heartless—that isn’t really my problem. Or the problem of any other consumer.
It’s hard for an industry that got people to pay for their products to get used to giving it away, and its understandable, in the face of withering advertising revenues, that they want to put an end to the free ride. Where’s the business model in “free”? Where’s the business model in a commoditized advertising sector?
The thing is, though, consumers haven’t really been paying for their magazines or newspapers in anything other than a symbolic way. Sometimes I have to pinch myself – can I really only be paying Condé Nast 89 cents an issue for The New Yorker? I don’t even want a free ride. Heck, I voluntarily pay $1 a day to NPR. So what’s going on?
Pay for Service, Yes, for Content, No
So far, paid content online has only succeeded when it is business content that is firmly inserted into the user’s workflow. In other words, a service is provided without which my job would be more difficult to do. Other times, it is, relatively speaking, content that bears a small cost that can be written off as a business expense—that would be the Wall Street Journal. There are very few pure consumer plays that successfully charge for content. But one of these rarities, Cook’s Illustrated, comes to mind.
The thing about Cook’s is that it provides genuinely useful and in-depth information that you can’t get anywhere else. They compete in an incredibly crowded field—there are free recipes all over the Web. But nowhere else can one find a chicken recipe that is the result of obsessive, forensic testing—135 times, boasts the Web site!
It will be very hard for Time Inc. and News Corp. to charge for content. There is an unfathomable amount of content on the Web. If they charge, someone else will offer it for free. Why? Because most of what they do is replicable. And if competitors can’t replicate, they can always aggregate. Mostly, that is, in fact, what is being done and consumers won’t pay for it and advertisers aren’t paying much either.
Time Inc. isn’t wrong to think that there has to be a better way. Actually, I believe that one day consumers will pay for some of their online or mobile content. But before that day comes, there will need to be some fundamental changes. Aggregators will need to be curators, finding the best, giving it context, making it relevant. Businesses producing new and unique content will need to be really, really good. In fact, they will need to be much better than most of the existing “paid for” media, which is mostly formulaic, superficial and timid.
Of course, not many business models can emulate Cook’s and sacrifice 217 chickens, 20 rolls of aluminum foil and test the patience of long-suffering tasters. And all for a better fried-chicken recipe in a world of a gazillion fried-chicken recipes. But that’s the point—the content that I will pay for will be the truly differentiated, borne of publishers with an obsession to do what they do the way that they do it. It will have a point of view, provide a genuine service, insert itself somehow into my day.
Content providers that pull this off will have to do another thing they haven’t done before: listen. And more: listen, and then allow their paying customers to shape what they do. After all, the community floodgates have long since opened, and Web site visitors expect to give their 2 cents and be heard—and that’s when it’s free. When you take their money, their expectations will be, justifiably, even higher.
Marta Wohrle is president of Accord Media. Marta is one of minonline's exclusive Minsiders, veterans from the print, digital, advertising and services industries who post throughout the week.
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