During our Week 9 session we debated the viability of news organizations' online paywalls. Some of you liked the idea that journalists should be paid more directly for the good work they do, but others saw the advantage in seeking out wider audiences via free delivery.
Ultimately, I argued, it would be hard to plug all the holes in such a porous, aggregated news world anyway, noting that it's quite easy to get past the Los Angeles Times' and New York Times' paywalls and, even if you couldn't, subscriber-bloggers would simply repeat their info.
Not that this is ideal. It's just the world we're working in.
We looked at how advertising is affecting the business, including a recent Pew study showing that traditional print news outlets were losing $10 in print advertising for every $1 in online ads they gained.
But, I noted, online readership is king -- online ad revenue was projected to be passing up print dollars this year -- and the production costs of getting eyeballs to see your news are much less than those of putting out a daily newspaper.
LA Weekly competes in a daily news market and comes up with a near-the-top readership ranking with only a handful of people. Paper, ink, delivery and production can take up as much as 65 percent of the costs of a traditional print operation. Add to that the idea that most news sites are much more niche-oriented and audience-specific. You probably wouldn't start an operation today that covers City Hall and sports, celebrities and recipes. It wouldn't make sense. You would focus. So if you doing an online-operation, you're starting with far fewer costs. At the same time, the readership potential is larger:
One in four Americans gets their news from a mobile device. And that number appears to be growing.
Putting up a wall could hinder your ability to reach the masses and make that smaller ad dollar more effective.
Not only that, but knowing your customer can mean bigger ad revenues. To cast a wide net like a traditional newspaper and hope that some of its many customers are, say, going to buy a watch soon is ineffective in today's environment. If you get to know your readers a little, that can be valuable.
One writer (previously noted) argues that paywalls punish those you need most -- your loyal reader. The casual reader should pay, not your regular, the argument goes: You want your regular customers to spend some time so you get to figure out what they're into.
We talked about how the iPad, for example, is showing that open access to your news can pay off in the form of previously slow nighttime readership (people like to cozy up with their iPads and seem to check news more frequently after work, leading to boosts in readers for late posts).
Finally, I encouraged everyone to promote themselves. It can be a third of the work these days. Don't be shy. Establish websites that reflect you as a news brand and present your best work.
No comments:
Post a Comment