Thanks for the suggestion. If anyone, anywhere, is going to succeed, they’ll need the right technical platform and an enormous marketing budget. If you’d like to help me out with those, I’ll be delighted to give your experiment a go.

Cheers,

Tim – Mumbrella

From 1st November Mumbrella introduces a subscription fee.

Pay the fee you get access. Don’t pay the fee, no more Mumbrella.

Anyone who uses Secondlife would have a basic understanding of what I mean.

The consumer would go to a banking site and pay something like $20au…
This would translate into, for example, a thousand micro dollars.

Then, if you go to a website or blog and like a persons work, then you pay them
whatever you feel is a nice amount… it could be ten to fifty points.

This system would also work for musos who’s music you listen to online and why not tip people for their tweets too, if that makes you happy?

Micro payments might not seem like much, but anyone who’s seen Brewsters Millions might understand the possibilities.

On rereading his speech, I agree that John Hartigan did indeed call for an improvement in journalistic practice in order to justify charging. But he also attacked the search engines, news aggregators and blogosphere without which any news service – paid, innovative or otherwise – is doomed to fail.

To quote him…

“The most profitable sites, in fact the only ones making serious money are the sites that aggregate news, like Google and Yahoo.

They pay nothing for content produced by newspaper journalists but make money by supplying it in easily searchable forms online.

The major media outlets have encouraged them to take a free ride on our content.”

http://mumbrella.com.au/hartig.....e-web-7306

He then goes on to slam search engines, news aggregators and blogs – despite the fact that without them, traffic to news sites would plummet. They’re not stealing content, they’re giving you extra eyeballs, extra readers and helping people find your content – for free. They’re not stealing any more than the Yellow Pages is stealing business from you by making money off helping people find your phone number. Search engines aren’t plagiarists, but the online version of the newsstand. Are newsagents to be criticised for making a profit on distributing your papers?

If Hartigan is actually advocating News Media develop something new and far greater than their current offering in order to live up to that claim, as Richard Freudenstein did, then I withdraw that part of my criticism of him. But this new proposition needs to be far more persuasive, though, than merely better journalism. Decent journalism is the cost of admission to be taken seriously on the web – and the cost of admission is free.

The Wall Street Journal example works only because it is specialist information with particular relevance to a niche audience that traditionally has no problem spending money to stay ahead. How other mainstream news sites achieve that same level of relevance, innovation and originality is a major challenge. even though NDM say that they know it is a major challenge, I’m not convinced they know how big the challenge is yet if they continue to attack the infrastructure they will need to incorporate into any successful online strategy – search engines, news aggregators and blog buzz.

Cheers as well (it’s Friday beer time after all)

Jonathan

But to think that search engines, news aggregators and blogs won’t be playing a role in any successful new venture by directing readers to that news content is incredibly naive.

I can’t speak for Brendan Hopkins, but your criticism of John Hartigan couldn’t be more wrong.

You say that Hartigan didn’t talk about “providing something unique, of true value and significantly different to the free alternatives”.

In the first minute of John’s speech to the National Press Club, he said

“I believe people will pay for content if it is:
- Original…
- Exclusive…
- Has the authority
- and is relevant to our audiences”

In regards to your pondering whether News ‘realises how big the challenge is’, I refer you to the summation of Richard’s speech –

“But make no mistake, News fully recognises the scale of the challenge.
We do not expect people to pay for something that isn’t worth it.
That applies to everything we do – not just online.
But we have the belief in our product and the weight of our history and experience behind us.”

Cheers
Steve

Previously, the speeches by Brendan Hopkins and John Hartigan displayed a distinct misunderstanding of how the web works and were advocating a subscription model – not based on providing something unique, of true value and significantly different to the free alternatives, as Freudenstein says – but because the search engines were “breaking into their homes and stealing their content” or because blog have “limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance”.

They clearly displayed that they didn’t understand how the internet economy and the sharing of information works and were building a case that the existing news sites were worthy of charging for because it just wasn’t cricket any other way.

Freudenstein seems to have grasped that free news isn’t a crime, it is the default setting on the web; and that to get off the default setting, you need to provide something of greater value and quality to motivate the consumer.

What I wonder is whether NDM realises how big the challenge is to differentiate News Media’s online product and proposition from the free alternatives.

Matt Granfield raises a great point – the ABC is the biggest threat to a paid news model. If commercial news media starts petitioning for a curb to the public broadcaster’s ability to provide free, quality news – as James packer did in his tirade against the BBC in Glasgow last month – then the backlash will be immense. Freudenstein used the example of Sky TV providing a different and better service to BBC television to justify the fees, NDM has a similar and potentially greater challenge.

Unfortunately news are looking at this, from “newspaper eyes”, effectively they are just doing the same thing theyve always done..which is sell a subscription/home delivery… but times have changed…unless a new vision appears its all over. Beter sell my shares now at a 30% loss rather than 100% loss in 5 years.