As readers will know from many previous articles, I’m very interested in the fundamental changes that are taking place in the way we consume (ie read and pay for) media. The changes that have taken place in the music industry with the introduction of digital music (which enabled file sharing) and iPod/iTunes (which killed the CD) is happening to print media now. The problem is that the newspaper sector hasn’t learnt any lessons from music. Putting music behind a paywall basically hasn’t worked. But the music industry has flourished by changing its model so that it uses the music itself as a way to get consumers to spend huge amounts on live concerts or advertisers to licence those tracks in TV adverts.
Back in 1995 I introduced one of (the?) first tech blogs in the UK – Hotnews. You are reading its successor HotViews right now! We use HotViews as a free (and highly addictive) means of selling clients our subscription research services. And it has been hugely successful. Ie Hotviews is like a free music track for you to enjoy. But we make our money elsewhere.
I have long been sceptical of the News Corp/Times new paywall model which puts everything behind the paywall. No free content at all. So I now cannot link to the excellent articles that Nic Fildes writes in The Times. That reduces both his influence and that of The Times itself.
According to an article in StrategyEye today, comScore reports that The Times website lost 1.2m UK readers in the first 3 months after its paywall went up.
The closest model to the TechMarketView/Hotviews model is that of the Financial Times. It allows free access to a limited number of articles each month so it retains its hyperlink credentials. It collects data on its ‘free’ users – which is hugely advantageous. It now has 3.2m registered users. Then it sells them subscriptions to its premium and archive services. It currently has more than 200,000 paying subscribers. Well in excess of anything else I know. They call this a Freemium model – exactly like HotViews.
Newspapers should learn from music. They have a wonderful marketing model and should use that model to sell all kinds of things from premium services (like the FT) to bingo (like The Sun). Erecting a paywall before you can see anything is not the way to do it. Few people have ever bought music or attended a concert before hearing it (possibly many times) first.