Content Strategy — New York City
Page 1
The Paid Content Debate
Held: January 14, 2010
STRUCTURING THE DEBATE
Participants split up into four groups. Each group takes on a persona and the
position represented by that persona. Each group presupposes the validity of
their position and argues that the online news industry can only achieve
profitability by adhering to their revenue model.
Group 1: You are ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
Position: Content should be free to consumers
Revenue model: Online advertising
Group 2: You are RUPERT MURDOCH
Position: Users must pay for content
Revenue model: Pay firewalls
Group 3: You are GOOGLE
Position: Users must pay, but not at the expense of searchable content.
Revenue model: Micropayments
Group 4: You are MALCOLM GLADWELL
Position: Users must pay. Content providers must innovate.
Revenue model: Under construction
APPROACHING THE MATERIALS
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Will the
How will
How will
How will
How will
How will
model work?
it affect your persona’s enterprise?
it affect web infrastructure?
it affect web-related industry in general?
it affect content itself?
it affect content professionals?
FRAMING THE ARGUMENT
McKinsey: What Matters: Will people pay for content online?
Clay Shirky: The high price of charging for content
“People will pay for content if it is necessary, irreplaceable, and
unshareable. Businesses excited about the first five words of that sentence
don't understand how constraining the next seven are.
“First, most content isn't necessary. It's optional. Traffic to the New York
Times's editorials fell precipitously during the days of their subscription
service, TimesSelect. People wanted to read Paul Krugman and David Brooks, but
they didn't need to. Second, replaceability is in the eye of the beholder. Your
coverage of the bailout may have different words than the competition's does,
but for the average reader, their reporting can be substituted for yours, and
vice versa. Third, people like sharing—and dislike not sharing—but getting
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Content Strategy — New York City
Page 2
The Paid Content Debate
Held: January 14, 2010
people to pay for content requires forbidding us from forwarding things we care
about to family and friends.
“In an analog world, per-copy pricing is a strategy for increasing the number
of available copies. In a digital world, per-copy pricing is a strategy for
decreasing the number of available copies. Pay wall revenues thus reduce
audiences and ad revenues, while creating a competitive advantage for (and an
audience exodus to) subsidized outlets—whether the subsidy comes from
advertisers or users.
“Pay walls also threaten syndication revenues, because syndicated content from
even one subsidized outlet will spread at the expense of all locked-down
versions.
“Fees thus attach to special cases: people pay Cook's Illustrated to reward it
for not taking ads. People pay the Financial Times because financial data is
valuable in inverse proportion to its availability (unlike editorials, say, or
political reporting). Harnessing users to expand reach is simple, cheap, and
powerful; even if you commit yourself to pretending content is scarce, many of
your competitors won't. This dynamic creates a competition between
organizations working with and against the Internet's innate capabilities.
“The key questions for the average publisher contemplating pay walls are: How
serious will that competition be? How many users will you lose? Will banning
sharing create a defensible advantage? And the answers are: crushing, most, and
no.”
Steven Brill: Two revenue streams are better than one
“When we launched Journalism Online last April there was a great deal of
misunderstanding about what we were doing. We were not suggesting that any
publication go behind a pay wall. Rather, we're enabling publishers to sell
content (mostly through subscriptions, although there may be some micro-sales)
to a small portion of their online audience while maintaining the traffic
necessary to sustain advertising revenue.
“So, if there's to be a debate about whether our model makes sense, it ought to
center on this question: Will, or should, publishers who invest in significant
original content—be they newspapers, magazines, or online only sites—continue
forever to give away everything they produce to everyone who wants it? Or, as
advertising rates continue to plummet amid a growing glut of inventory, should
they, and can they, create a circulation revenue stream, too? Here are three of
the ways our 16-dial Reader Revenue Platform™ enables them to do that:
“Sampling: Publishers will set a dial so that only the most avid online readers
are asked to pay. Everyone else will continue to read, and see ads, undeterred.
These avid readers may be defined as those who come to the site ten times a
month, or 30, or six—or any other measure of engagement the publisher sets (and
re-sets as the market develops).
“Market Access Pay Points: Publishers will adjust payment requests and amounts
based on whether the reader is in- or out-of market. Thus, a newspaper based in
London with a small but highly engaged U.S. audience could charge them (and
sacrifice minimal ad revenue because its advertisers are likely to be looking
for a UK audience.) Or, a college newspaper could use Market Access Pay Points
to get alumni and parents to pay a few dollars a month while keeping the paper
free to the college community.
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Content Strategy — New York City
Page 3
The Paid Content Debate
Held: January 14, 2010
“Select Content Pay Points: Publishers can charge for certain high value
content (perhaps in concert with a sampling plan), while keeping much of the
site free.
“Thus, we're not suggesting that any publisher make an either-or choice between
ad revenue and reader-revenue but, rather, that publishers do what they've
always done: go for both.”
Shirky's response to Brill
“Journalism Online assumes that publishers' failure to retain pricing power
online is a readily reversible accident. Were this true, any publication could
start charging tomorrow, as JO's technical solutions aren't rocket science.
Publishers can't start charging tomorrow, of course, because their problem
isn't technology—it's new and brutal competition. JO's real offering isn't
tools, but collusion.
“Adding fees online inhibits use while rewarding disloyalty. Deciding to
aggravate only your most faithful users, alumni, or expats limits this tradeoff but doesn't change it. It's no accident that the Big Three fee-for-content
services—the FT, the Economist, and the WSJ—all reach price-insensitive
audiences. The sad fact for most publishers is that there is no cartel large
enough to make the average reader similarly price insensitive, and no user
revenues that can offset competition from ad-supported and nonprofit
publishers.”
Brill's response to Shirky
“This exchange demonstrates how last year the either/or debate has become. In
fact, I agree completely with Clay's analysis, so this isn't much of a debate.
We're against the same pay walls he is. What we're all about is providing our
multidial Reader Revenue Platform™ to enable publishers to charge only their
most engaged, addicted customers only for that which is, as Clay puts it so
well, "necessary and irreplaceable." As for his point about readers being able
to share, he's right, and we have a plan for that too. Space constraints don't
allow me to describe it here in detail, but it has a lot to do with our
sampling and viral marketing strategies.”
—Clay Shirky is associate new media professor in the ITP grad program at NYC.
Steven Brill founded Journalism Online, among other things (McKinsey & Co.,
What Matters, 10/14/2009).
http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/the_debate_zone/will-people-pay-forcontent-online
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Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
source materials retain original rights.]
Content Strategy — New York City
Group 1: You are: ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
YOU ARE: ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
Position: Content should be free to consumers
Revenue model: Online advertising
History
“Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ... That
tension will not go away.”
—Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, Viking Penguin,
1987 (ISBN 0-14-009701-5), p. 202.
“In 1990 Richard Stallman restated the concept but without the
anthropomorphization:
I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By
'free' I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the
information and to adapt it to one's own uses... When information is
generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter
who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.”
—Dorothy E. Denning, Concerning Hackers Who Break into Computer Systems, in
Proceedings of the 13th National Computer Security Conference, Washington,
D.C., October, 1990, pp. 653–664 (online)
[Via Wikipedia. Speaking of which:]
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to
the sum of all human knowledge."
— Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, in an appeal for donations. (Right now.)
“Rupert Murdoch's move to charge for content opens doors for competitors”
“Vivian Schiller, now CEO of National Public Radio in the US, said in an
interview with Newsweek last week that talk of charging for news online is
‘mass delusion’. She should know. Schiller was head of nytimes.com when it
charged and then stopped charging for its content.
“If you can charge for your content - if you are the FT or the Wall
Journal, the only brands that do it successfully - and your readers
money on your content, and pass the cost of it onto their employers
nothing against it. But for most, pinning hopes for the survival of
charging for it is not only futile but possibly suicidal.
Street
can make
I have
news on
“Charging for content brings marketing and customer-service costs. Online, it
reduces audience and the advertising they justify. Putting content behind a
wall cuts it off from search and links; they cut off your Googlejuice.
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Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
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Content Strategy — New York City
Group 1: You are: ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
“When publishers build those walls, they open the door for free competitors,
who can now enter the content business with virtually no barrier to entry.
Publishers who fool themselves into thinking pay will save the day only further
forestall the innovation and experimentation that is the only possible path to
success online.
“FT editor Lionel Barber has predicted that most newspapers will charge online
because they should - and should never have given away their content. But I've
never heard a business plan built on the verb ‘should’.
“Newspapers have had 15 years since the launch of the internet browser to
reimagine and rebuild themselves for the reality of the post-Gutenberg age. But
they didn't. Now they are trying to reclaim old business models for a new media
economy — a link economy, I call it, in which links give content value. Cut
yourself off from links, behind pay walls, and you cut yourself off from the
internet and its real value.”
—Jeff Jarvis, journalism professor at NYU and author of What Would Google Do?
(The Guardian, 8/6/2009)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/06/rupert-murdoch-charging-for-content
FOR DISCUSSION
General:

Will the model work?

How will it affect your persona’s enterprise?

How will it affect web infrastructure?

How will it affect web-related industry in general?

How will it affect content itself?

How will it affect content professionals?
Specific:

Can online advertising still proffer a viable economic model for
editorial websites?

How has the economic downturn over the last few years influenced this
debate?

Does Jarvis’s point about paid content models cutting off search and
links make sense from a content strategy perspective?

Who does Arianna Huffington think she is?
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To
view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
source materials retain original rights.]
Content Strategy — New York City
Group 2: You are: RUPERT MURDOCH
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
YOU ARE: RUPERT MURDOCH
Position: Users must pay for content
Revenue model: Pay firewalls
Why Media Must Charge for Web Content
“The high cost of producing original content historically was subsidized at
newspapers and other media by the sale of subscriptions and advertising.
“With a few exceptions like Consumer Reports, which accepts no advertising and
relies entirely on subscription sales, most of the media that sell advertising
charge nominal subscription rates to build the largest possible audience.
“This worked quite well in the pre-Internet era, when publishers for the most
part were able to charge sufficiently high ad rates to subsidize the cost of
content and make a handsome profit.
“When the Internet emerged, most publishers committed the Original Sin of
thoughtlessly giving away their content for free in the hopes of attracting
millions of page views where they could sell the sort of high-priced ads that
had built the value of their print franchises. This monumental strategic
blunder resulted in three major unintended, and unfortunate, consequences:

By giving away their content on the web, publishers made it unnecessary
for consumers to subscribe to the publications that generated the high
advertising revenues that subsidize the cost of producing content. When
advertisers saw audiences begin to shrink, they cut back their
advertising. That’s why many newspapers have gone from typically being
more profitable than Wal-Mart and even some oil companies to hanging on by
a thread.

Publishers devalued their once-powerful franchises by letting anyone link
freely to their content on the web. In so doing, publishers inadvertently
subsidized the rise of any number of aggregators that have done quite well
by selling low-priced advertising next to the expensive content that the
publishers kindly let them have for free. The low price of the advertising
on those websites is attracting ever-greater shares of the ad dollars
formerly spent at the traditional media companies. At the same time,
virtually unlimited ad inventory at competing online venues has driven
down the rates newspapers can charge for both print and online
advertising.

The wide availability of free content on the web quickly convinced
consumers, who didn’t need much persuading, that content should be free.
Apart from crossword fanatics like my brother in law who has to have a
newspaper on which to write the answers, most consumers saw no particular
reason to pay for a paper when the same information could be obtained more
quickly and conveniently on the Net or an iPhone.”
…
“[I]t is unreasonable to believe generic news can be effectively sequestered
behind a pay firewall. A publisher attempting to do this simply would divert
readers from his site to some else’s, throttling the traffic that is the
lifeblood of any media business.
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Content Strategy — New York City
Group 2: You are: RUPERT MURDOCH
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
…
“Now, on to the business of trying to save the media business.
“If we are going to save the tradition of professional journalism, it is vital
for publishers to begin producing content that is sufficiently unique,
authoritative and valuable to motivate consumers to pay for it.
“The need for the traditional media companies to produce more and better
content could not come at a worse time. Newsroom budgets are being gutted by
historic declines in ad sales, aggravated by the need for many companies to
generate unreasonably large profits to service the heavy debt they incurred to
fund ill-considered and ill-timed acquisitions.
“As a direct consequence of the breakdown in the traditional media business
model, publishers today are cutting the quality and quantity of the content
they produce at the very moment they should be investing more aggressively than
ever in the sole distinguishing capability that powerfully differentiates them
from the millions of websites that are siphoning away their readers and
advertisers.
“As the most challenged of all the distressed media companies, newspapers are
so strapped today that they are producing ever less original reporting. In but
one example of the decimation, the number of reporters covering the nation’s
capital for American newspapers has dropped by half since 1995 to 300
correspondents.
“This is not merely a step in the wrong direction. It is a leap into the abyss.
“Fortunately for publishers, for-pay content doesn’t have to be the Watergate
investigation of the future. People will pay for all manner of content on the
web, it if it is thoughtfully conceived and marketed.
“U.S. News and World Report sells access to school rankings and other detailed
college data. Consumer Reports gets paid for rating refrigerators.
Congressional Quarterly sells high-priced, inside-the-Beltway dope. The New
Yorker makes money off reprints of its cartoons. Millions are spent on Kindle
books, iPhone applications and even ring tones.
“The Wall Street Journal, which claims more than 1 million paid subscribers to
its website, is the most notable among newspapers in charging for access to
some of its content. How does it get away with charging, when so much business
information is available for free from places like Yahoo Finance and 24/7 Wall
St.?
“The answer is: Original, authoritative reporting and the power of its brand.
“Notwithstanding the recent layoff of a small percentage of its staff, the
Journal continues reporting at essentially full force to get ahead of and
behind complex stories involving business, investing and the economy.
“The Journal’s generally reliable and insightful reporting – which is flashed
immediately across a variety of interactive and mobile platforms – provides
critical and actionable information to executives, investors and policy makers.
To steal an old tag line from Forbes, it is an indispensable capitalist tool.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To
view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
source materials retain original rights.]
Content Strategy — New York City
Group 2: You are: RUPERT MURDOCH
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
“By aggregating an audience of business people willing and able to pay to view
its content, the Journal also has created a premium audience for advertisers,
who pay top dollar to reach it. Thus, selling content reaps the additional
benefit of boosting ad revenees.
“The Journal isn’t the only newspaper charging for content. You also hit pay
walls at places like the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Santa Barbara NewsPress. But the story is different in each place.
“Walter E. Hussman, the publisher of the Little Rock paper, admitted in a
recent email to being on the “wrong side” of the paid-content debate for more
than decade. And he couldn’t be happier.
“I think the most compelling argument [for charging for content] is our paid
circulation,” he said, noting that his average daily sale of 176,275 was 1.7%
higher in 2008 than it was 10 years earlier. This contrasts starkly with the
sharp circulation plunge suffered by the rest of the industry in the last
decade.
“Like the publishers of many small and medium papers, Hussman is fortunate to
have scant competition in his market. With by far the largest force of
reporters covering Arkansas, his paper is a must-read for anyone who wants to
know what is happening in the state.
“As long as the Gazette continues to publish exclusive and authoritative local
news, Hussman can continue charging for access to his site. His ability to
charge, it should be emphasized, is what helps support the production of the
valuable content that gives his brand an unfair advantage over any would-be
competitor.
“By contrast, the Santa Barbara News-Press is living proof that geography and a
long-standing franchise won’t let a publisher successfully charge for content
that isn’t perceived by readers as being unique and valuable:
“While the News-Press could scarcely be more isolated from California’s several
large media markets, its for-pay website has been overtaken by a free site
operated by the upstart Santa Barbara Independent.
“The 53,817 unique visitors to the Independent site in January were more than
double the traffic at the News-Press site, according to Compete.Com. In the
last year, significantly, the Independent’s traffic rocketed by 48% while the
News-Press audience fell 10% in the same period.
“The weakness of the News-Press web strategy was revealed during the
devastating fire in November that destroyed more than 100 homes. Scant
information on the fast-moving blaze was available for non-subscribers at the
News-Press site. At the same time, however, the Independent.Com brimmed with
up-to-the-minute bulletins, first-person reports and even fire photos emailed
from a Santa Barbara resident to his brother in Ohio, who posted them on the
site because the California brother had lost his Internet connection.
“The lesson here is not that free content trumps pay (though, all things being
equal, it will) but that there has to be much more to a pay strategy than a
publisher’s desire to want to be paid. This goes double when the publisher has
been giving his valuable content away for free for the better part of two
decades, as most newspapers have done.
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view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
source materials retain original rights.]
Content Strategy — New York City
Group 2: You are: RUPERT MURDOCH
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
“The trick to charging for content, therefore, is coming up with unique and
valuable information that people will pay for. The converse is to let
information be free that ought to be free. Things, for example, like the life threatening community emergency in Santa Barbara.
…
“Paid content doesn’t have to be business-oriented. It simply has to scratch
the itch of a large enough niche of readers to make it worthwhile to produce
the content.
“Although the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel provides plenty of free coverage of
the Green Bay Packers, the paper for years also has published a premium “Packer
Insider” newsletter. Judging from the enormous number of people you see at
Packer games wearing $17.95 plastic cheese wedges on their heads (not to
mention the $34.95 cheese bra), the team should have at least 25,000 die-hard
fans willing to shell out $44.95 annually for the newsletter. Assuming there
are, the newsletter would be grossing more than $1 million a year.
“The biggest mistake a newspaper can make is to cheap out on premium content. A
few years ago, the Sacramento Bee tried selling an expensive newsletter that
promised a wealth of exclusive insider news from the state’s capital. It should
have been a hit.
“Instead of profound insights, exclusive tips and actionable information,
however, it was padded with things like the governor’s schedule for the next
day. So, the newsletter flopped. Not because people won’t pay for content but
because it failed to deliver enough unique, authoritative and actionable
information to merit a premium price.
“If you happen to be a publisher wrestling with how to move from free to paid
content, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t charge for it. If it’s good
enough, readers will pay. If you attract the right audience, advertisers will
pay, too.
…”
—Alan Mutter, Journalism and Technology Consultant (March 1-2, 2009)
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/03/why-media-must-charge-for-webcontent.html
FOR DISCUSSION
General:

Will the model work?

How will it affect your persona’s enterprise?

How will it affect web infrastructure?

How will it affect web-related industry in general?

How will it affect content itself?
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To
view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
source materials retain original rights.]
Content Strategy — New York City
Group 2: You are: RUPERT MURDOCH

The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
How will it affect content professionals?
Specific:

Is there a difference between the kinds of content users will pay for and
the kinds they won’t?

Would the pay firewall model require a collective shift across the entire
news publishing industry? Has anybody thought about whether that would
constitute illegal price-fixing?

What makes the Wall Street Journal a successful model? What happened when
the NYT tried it?

Does Rupert Murdoch care about anything but Rupert Murdoch?
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view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
source materials retain original rights.]
Content Strategy — New York City
Group 3: You are: GOOGLE
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
YOU ARE: GOOGLE
Position: Users must pay, but not at the expense of searchable content.
Revenue model: Micropayments
“How to Save Your Newspaper”
TIME Online
“During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown
proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities
will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations
will employ no more than a handful of reporters.
“There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis.
Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of
newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular
than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.
“The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news
organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research
Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got
their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines.
Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to
the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content,
I'd feel like a fool paying for it.
“This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to [be]
when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could
pretend to be among the clan who "got it" by chanting the mantra that the adsupported Web was "the future." But when Web advertising declined in the fourth
quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that
a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings….
“Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources:
newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies
only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg
is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a
result of the recession — the stool can't possibly stand.
“Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway
publications that relied solely on ad revenue. He called that formula ‘morally
abhorrent’ and also ‘economically self-defeating.’ That was because he believed
that good journalism required that a publication's primary duty be to its
readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the
incentive is perverse. It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will
weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on
them for your revenue. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, Dr.
Johnson said, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Journalism's fortnight is
upon us, and I suspect that 2009 will be remembered as the year news
organizations realized that further rounds of cost-cutting would not stave off
the hangman….
“One option for survival being tried by some publications, such as the
Christian Science Monitor and the Detroit Free Press, is to eliminate or
drastically cut their print editions and focus on their free websites. Others
may try to ride out the long winter, hope that their competitors die and pray
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view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
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Content Strategy — New York City
Group 3: You are: GOOGLE
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
that they will grab a large enough share of advertising to make a profitable go
of it as free sites. That's fine. We need a variety of competing strategies.
“These approaches, however, still make a publication completely beholden to its
advertisers. So I am hoping that this year will see the dawn of a bold, old
idea that will provide yet another option that some news organizations might
choose: getting paid by users for the services they provide and the journalism
they produce.
“This notion of charging for content is an old idea not simply because
newspapers and magazines have been doing it for more than four centuries. It's
also something they used to do at the dawn of the online era, in the early
1990s. Back then there were a passel of online service companies, such as
Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and AOL. They used to charge users for the minutes
people spent online, and it was naturally in their interest to keep the users
online for as long as possible. As a result, good content was valued. When I
was in charge of TIME's nascent online-media department back then, every year
or so we would play off AOL and CompuServe; one year the bidding for our
magazine and bulletin boards reached $1 million.
“Then along came tools that made it easier for publications and users to
venture onto the open Internet rather than remain in the walled gardens created
by the online services. I remember talking to Louis Rossetto, then the editor
of Wired, about ways to put our magazines directly online, and we decided that
the best strategy was to use the hypertext markup language and transfer
protocols that defined the World Wide Web. Wired and TIME made the plunge the
same week in 1994, and within a year most other publications had done so as
well. We invented things like banner ads that brought in a rising tide of
revenue, but the upshot was that we abandoned getting paid for content.
“One of history's ironies is that hypertext — an embedded Web link that refers
you to another page or site — had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early
1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make
sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision,
all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments
for whatever content was accessed. Instead, the Web got caught up in the ethos
that information wants to be free. Others smarter than we were had avoided that
trap. For example, when Bill Gates noticed in 1976 that hobbyists were freely
sharing Altair BASIC, a code he and his colleagues had written, he sent an open
letter to members of the Homebrew Computer Club telling them to stop. ‘One
thing you do is prevent good software from being written,’ he railed. ‘Who can
afford to do professional work for nothing?’
“The easy Internet ad dollars of the late 1990s enticed newspapers and
magazines to put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles,
onto their websites for free. But the bulk of the ad dollars has ended up
flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead
piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators.
“Another group that benefits from free journalism is Internet service
providers. They get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access to the
Web's trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not in their
interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge for their
content. Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to
paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems
technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents
for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.
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Content Strategy — New York City
Group 3: You are: GOOGLE
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
“Currently a few newspapers, most notably the Wall Street Journal, charge for
their online editions by requiring a monthly subscription. When Rupert Murdoch
acquired the Journal, he ruminated publicly about dropping the fee. But Murdoch
is, above all, a smart businessman. He took a look at the economics and decided
it was lunacy to forgo the revenue — and that was even before the online ad
market began contracting. Now his move looks really smart. Paid subscriptions
for the Journal's website were up more than 7% in a very gloomy 2008. Plus, he
spooked the New York Times into dropping its own halfhearted attempts to get
subscription revenue, which were based on the (I think flawed) premise that it
should charge for the paper's punditry rather than for its great reporting.
(Author's note: After publication the New York Times vehemently denied that
their thinking was influenced by outside considerations; I accept their
explanation.)
“But I don't think that subscriptions will solve everything — nor should they
be the only way to charge for content. A person who wants one day's edition of
a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going
to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under
today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think,
is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something
like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a
really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper,
magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the
creator chooses to charge.
“Admittedly, the Internet is littered with failed micropayment companies. If
you remember Flooz, Beenz, CyberCash, Bitpass, Peppercoin and DigiCash, it's
probably because you lost money investing in them. Many tracts and blog entries
have been written about how the concept can't work because of bad tech or
mental transaction costs.
“But things have changed. ‘With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their
audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also
to the news itself,’ wrote the savvy New York Times columnist David Carr last
month in a column endorsing the idea of paid content. This creates a necessity
that ought to be the mother of invention. In addition, our two most creative
digital innovators have shown that a pay-per-drink model can work when it's
made easy enough: Steve Jobs got music consumers (of all people) comfortable
with the concept of paying 99 cents for a tune instead of Napsterizing an
entire industry, and Jeff Bezos with his Kindle showed that consumers would buy
electronic versions of books, magazines and newspapers if purchases could be
done simply. (See Apple's 10 best business moves.)
“What Internet payment options are there today? PayPal is the most famous, but
it has transaction costs too high for impulse buys of less than a dollar. The
denizens of Facebook are embracing systems like Spare Change, which allows them
to charge their PayPal accounts or credit cards to get digital currency they
can spend in small amounts. Similar services include Bee-Tokens and Tipjoy.
Twitter users have Twitpay, which is a micropayment service for the
micromessaging set. Gamers have their own digital currencies that can be used
for impulse buys during online role-playing games. And real-world commuters are
used to gizmos like E-ZPass, which deducts automatically from their prepaid
account as they glide through a highway tollbooth.
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Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
source materials retain original rights.]
Content Strategy — New York City
Group 3: You are: GOOGLE
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
“Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for
an article or a dime for that day's full edition or $2 for a month's worth of
Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click
through if it were cheap and easy enough.
“The system could be used for all forms of media: magazines and blogs, games
and apps, TV newscasts and amateur videos, porn pictures and policy monographs,
the reports of citizen journalists, recipes of great cooks and songs of garage
bands. This would not only offer a lifeline to traditional media outlets but
also nourish citizen journalists and bloggers. They have vastly enriched our
realms of information and ideas, but most can't make much money at it. As a
result, they tend to do it for the ego kick or as a civic contribution. A
micropayment system would allow regular folks, the types who have to worry
about feeding their families, to supplement their income by doing citizen
journalism that is of value to their community.
“When I used to go fishing in the bayous of Louisiana as a boy, my friend
Thomas would sometimes steal ice from those machines outside gas stations. He
had the theory that ice should be free. We didn't reflect much on who would
make the ice if it were free, but fortunately we grew out of that phase.
Likewise, those who believe that all content should be free should reflect on
who will open bureaus in Baghdad or be able to fly off as freelancers to report
in Rwanda under such a system.
“I say this not because I am ‘evil,’ which is the description my daughter
slings at those who want to charge for their Web content, music or apps.
Instead, I say this because my daughter is very creative, and when she gets
older, I want her to get paid for producing really neat stuff rather than come
to me for money or decide that it makes more sense to be an investment banker.
“I say this, too, because I love journalism. I think it is valuable and should
be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on
journalists: they must produce things that people actually value. I suspect we
will find that this necessity is actually liberating. The need to be valued by
readers — serving them first and foremost rather than relying solely on
advertising revenue — will allow the media once again to set their compass true
to what journalism should always be about.”
—Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of TIME, president and CEO of the
Aspen Institute and author, most recently, of Einstein: His Life and Universe
(Time online, 2/5/2009)
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191,00.html?iid=sphereinline-sidebar
FOR DISCUSSION
General:

Will the model work?

How will it affect your persona’s enterprise?

How will it affect web infrastructure?

How will it affect web-related industry in general?
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view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
source materials retain original rights.]
Content Strategy — New York City
Group 3: You are: GOOGLE

How will it affect content itself?

How will it affect content professionals?
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
Specific:

Can editorial content be compared directly to the content sold on iTunes?

Does this article betray any underlying assumptions about content
creation or content professionals? What are the implications for content
strategy?

Is Google going to take over the universe? Or just the known universe?
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view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
source materials retain original rights.]
Content Strategy — New York City
Group 4: You are: MALCOLM GLADWELL
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
YOU ARE: MALCOLM GLADWELL
Position: Users must pay. Content providers must innovate.
Revenue model: Under construction.
“Newspaper web sites must shift their primary focus from connecting people-tocontent to connecting people-to-people first, a.k.a. social networking. This is
how news is going to get consumed as well as generate new revenue. Will this
revenue support the current newsrooms? Highly unlikely. News organizations need
to restructure. Many are being forced to through layoffs.
“We need creative minds to think of new ways to monetize the changing media
landscape. Attempts to setup pay walls is nothing more than last gasp efforts
to retain a dying business model in a new media world.”
—Eric Kaiser, Director of New Media Development, Sun Journal/Sun Media Group
(March 9, 2009)
http://erickaiser.com/?p=98
Business Week — The Tech Beat
“Edgeio's New Model for Paid Content”
“Edgeio, a site that aggregates classified listings across the Internet, today
is introducing a new way for content creators to sell their digital wares—and
for publishers to distribute it and take a cut. Although some folks, such as
Jeff Jarvis, are not big fans of paid content online, even he thinks the
Silicon Valley startup’s ‘transactional classified’ has interesting potential.
“Essentially, you’ll be able to view and then immediately buy premium content
on a site, whether that’s a research report, a song, a video, or an event
ticket, without leaving the site to pay for it. At the same time, other
publishers, whether Web sites, Web stores, blogs or whatever, can provide a
link to the content and take a cut of resulting sales. So Edgeio’s providing a
way to distribute content much more widely than on a single site or store. A
rock band, for instance, could enable the sale of an album through fan blogs,
and the fans get a cut along the way to sweeten the deal.
“Here’s how Edgeio CEO Keith Teare describes it:
We are making it possible for valuable content to be made available
for sale on any web site. The web site does not need to have an ecommerce
system, or a billing system – edgeio takes care of both. We have two
customers for whom we work to make this possible. Firstly a content
creator who has paid content that they would like to sell and have
distributed. The content creator comes to edgeio and tells us about their
content and we give them the means of publishing it. Secondly a
publisher, whose main goal is to add revenue to their web site. The
publisher comes to edgeio and can choose to become a point of sale for
any paid content that they wish to be associated with. Any web site in
the world can now become a point of sale for the things they are
passionate about.
“And here’s how the revenue model works, so far:
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view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
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Content Strategy — New York City
Group 4: You are: MALCOLM GLADWELL
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
Edgeio’s business model is to enable a three-way revenue share.
Firstly edgeio itself takes 20% of all transactions. The content creator
takes the other 80%. The content creator can choose to enable affiliates
to become additional sales points for the content and can define how its
80% is split with an affiliate. In that case their content always appears
with a “Resell this Item” link, allowing affiliates to sign up as
additional points of sale.
“As Jarvis notes, though, the most interesting part may be less the payment
system than the new distribution system, a potentially viral way to get content
out there well beyond the confines of a single Web site or store.”
—Rob Hof, Silicon Valley bureau chief, BusinessWeek, 8/10/2009
http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/7332.1412913873
Stop the Presses (Editor & Publisher)
by Steve Outing
“Forget Micropayments -- Here's a Far Better Idea for Monetizing Content…”
…
“There is a better way [than micropayments] for online publishers to get people
to pay for their content -- and of the many recent articles about how the
newspaper industry can get people to start paying for their content (since
online advertising alone doesn't bring in enough money to support large
newsrooms), I've yet to see any suggestions like a model that I learned about
recently from a California start-up venture called Kachingle….
…
“I don't know if Kachingle will be the company that becomes the giant of online
content payments; a lot depends on the execution, and the inevitable
competition. But I do believe that the patented model Kachingle represents can
work, and that it will allow online publishers to earn money from users paying
for content.
Paradigm shift
“To start with, publishers have to get over the idea that they are going to get
paid directly by the user. For the vast majority of a news publisher's content,
there can be no barriers before an article asking the user if he wants to pay a
penny or a nickel, or buy a $2 monthly subscription, to read on.
“The user must be given the option of whether to pay for a Web site's content
(by financially supporting the site), or read it for free. I'm betting this one
will be a tough pill to swallow for many industry executives with traditional
media mindsets, but it's critical because it fits the culture, indeed the
nature, of the Internet. Traditional micropayment schemes for online news
content – ‘pay up or go elsewhere’ -- fight it, and thus are doomed to fail, in
my view.
“Newspaper executives also have to grasp the notion that few publishers will be
able to get very many people to pay for their content specifically. The Wall
Street Journal Online can do it, because many of its paid online subscribers
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Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
source materials retain original rights.]
Content Strategy — New York City
Group 4: You are: MALCOLM GLADWELL
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
are businesspeople who can charge the subscription bill to their expense
accounts. Most other newspapers will only be able to charge online users
directly for truly premium content that is not replicated somewhere else -- for
example, e-books and other high-value content that's not typical newspaper
fare.
“Newspapers probably can charge for some multi-platform personalized news and
information services, if they're good enough and useful enough. But that's not
charging for the content (the news), it's charging for the valuable service of
individual customization.
“Also perhaps hard to accept (but you have to): The online news consumer
samples many brands, from the New York Times to Joe's Blog. Most online users
visit many Web sites on a typical day, bouncing around the world of free
content. They'll have a few media brands and bloggers that they visit
regularly, but they also encounter new ones frequently, via the serendipitous
link spotted when reading something from a known media brand, to the
recommendation of a friend on Facebook or Twitter or e-mail. Your once-powerful
newspaper brand doesn't mean as much as it used to, and to get paid for
newspaper content online, it must become part of a giant pool of content that's
financially supported en masse.
“Think of it this way and you'll understand the core concept behind Kachingle:
Just as online users currently pay an Internet provider $30 or more a month for
their computers to access the Internet, and perhaps a monthly fee for all the
music they want from a service like Rhapsody, they'll also pay a monthly fee
for all the news and blog content on the Web. Only the last fee is voluntary,
and it will be up to publishers to educate the public on the importance of
paying for content online. (National Public Radio has been doing this for
itself for decades. Now commercial news publishers and bloggers need to do it
to benefit all of them, not just one entity.)
“The next important point to grasp about the Kachingle model is that it allows
individuals to financially support the online content providers that they like
best. So if a newspaper wants to get paid for its content when a Web site
visitor clicks through to one of its articles, it should ask that the visitor
support the site via Kachingle.
Kachingle specifics
“I've explained some of the concepts -- now let's get to the specifics, best
understood in list form.
“The Web user experience:



As you read news sites and blogs all over the Web, you'll start to see
sites with Kachingle "medallions."
You'll join Kachingle by registering (the sites you visit will probably
encourage you to), and you'll agree to pay a monthly fee to support
valuable online content from publishers and bloggers you like.
When the service starts in beta, the monthly default fee will be $5, but
ultimately you'll be able to set whatever amount you wish. You might
decide that all the content you read on media sites and blogs for "free"
is worth $1 a month because that's all you can afford, or perhaps you can
give $100 a month. It's your decision, in the same way you decide how
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view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
source materials retain original rights.]
Content Strategy — New York City
Group 4: You are: MALCOLM GLADWELL






The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
much you give to National Public Radio stations during their regular
pledge drives.
You can ignore Kachingle's plea for you to pay a monthly fee for online
news and blog content, just as you can choose to send nothing to the NPR
station but still listen to it. You will be able to see any free content
on any site that has a Kachingle medallion.
If you are a paying Kachingle account holder, you'll sign in once per
device (PC, laptop, smart phone) and be remembered. So anytime you visit
a site that uses Kachingle, the Kachingle medallion will recognize you.
As a Kachingle account holder, when you visit, say, NYTimes.com, the
Kachingle medallion on its pages will ask if you'd like to support the
site. If you do, you'll click the support button on the medallion, which
means that some of the monthly fee you pay Kachingle will go to
NYTimes.com. That site will always remember that you support it, but the
medallion will allow you to rescind support with one click.
You'll see Kachingle medallions on lots of sites (in theory). Click to
support the ones you like, or don't, as you visit them. You may end up
with, say, three newspaper Web sites, one magazine site, and 30 blogs
that you want to support; at each of those you would have clicked the
Kachingle support button once.
Now what happens is that Kachingle tracks your Web site and blog visits
over the month. If you visited NYTimes.com 30 times,
Editorandpublisher.com 10 times, and the blog SteveOuting.com 10 times
(but none of the other sites that you support), then NYTimes.com would
get 60% of your monthly Kachingle fee, and Editorandpublisher.com and my
blog would get 20% each. In other words, the money you spend on your
monthly Kachingle account is allotted by how often you visit the sites
you support, rather than every site you support getting an even split of
your money. (You may click to support a blog, but then never return to
it; that blog won't get any of your money other than for the initial
visit.)
Kachingle doesn't change the current Web experience. Most content remains
free, and you can view it as always with no barriers or mental
transaction costs.
“The publisher experience:




Any publisher can join Kachingle for free. You can be an individual
blogger with 100 readers, or NYTimes.com.
Participating publishers put a Kachingle "medallion" (or more than one)
on their Web sites, typically in a right or left column and highly
visible. (Simple: Sign up as a Kachingle publisher and add a code snippet
to your site's template.)
As people visit your site who are already Kachingle users, they will see
a “Support” button on the Kachingle medallion. If they like your site or
blog and want to contribute some of their monthly Kachingle fee to it,
they'll click “Support.”
Initially, Kachingle will count an individual user visiting your site as
one point, even if he reads 10 stories in a session. The supported blog
that's visited by the same user who only clicks on a single page also
gets logged as one point. A more sophisticated tracking system that would
split funds among publishers based on page counts rather than site visits
is possible in the future, according to Typaldos. She says Kachingle
wants to start with a very simple system for the user to get them used to
what is a new concept: voluntarily paying for online content. But as the
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Content Strategy — New York City
Group 4: You are: MALCOLM GLADWELL
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
service evolves, the company will create new algorithms that Kachinglers
will be able to choose. For example, a user might prefer to have her
money split based on number of pages viewed, rather than the simpler
split between sites visited. A Kachingler might request that 80% of his
money goes to news sites and 20% goes to blogs. There are lots of
possibilities, but Kachingle with start with a simple fixed model.




While Kachingle might appear to favor bloggers who have limited content
over giant news Web sites with lots of content, Typaldos says one option
for the larger sites is to use multiple Kachingle medallions. For
example, NYTimes.com if it had a single medallion would only get credited
1 point per day for every visitor. But it could use different medallions
on each of its many blogs and perhaps earn more. The trade-off would be
in simplicity for the consumer. In the latter scenario, a Kachingler
would choose to support (or become a fan of) different blogs within the
site, rather than clicking a Kachingle medallion just once to initiate
financial support for NYTimes.com as a whole.
All the monthly user fees (or contributions) collected by Kachingle are
dispersed to participating publishers based on Kachingle account holders'
Web activity on sites that they support. Kachingle will take 20% of the
fees to support its business.
Publishers will promote Kachingle in different ways, depending on how
aggressive they want to be. Some might have nothing but a Kachingle
medallion and hope that their site visitors will support their site if
they are already Kachingle account holders. Others may choose to be more
assertive and use a pop-up box requesting that site users sign up for
Kachingle and support the site. (Kachingle will have such a pop-up
available in the future.) Of course, the latter choice may annoy and/or
turn away some Web site visitors, so the decision on how aggressively you
want to ask for support is one you'll want to take seriously. Kachingle
is offering marketing advice to participating publishers.
The publisher's site will not change in any way other than the added
Kachingle medallion. Anyone can read the content, just as before, whether
they are a Kachingle account holder or not, and whether they support your
site via Kachingle or not.
“As you can see, other than the initial effort of signing up for Kachingle and
thus deciding to financially support online content, there is no mental
transaction cost to the online user in visiting a news site or blog. Click,
read, share any content as you've always done with no barriers in the way. The
only mental effort expended is one time per Web site: Do I financially Support
this site or not? If I support it, I make one click.
…
Publishers need to educate, market
“The power of the system is in its many participants. [I]t will be important
for any participating publisher to urge their users to sign up for a Kachingle
account ($5 a month as things start up), and educate and persuade them of the
importance that they (voluntarily) pay for online content. The trick -- and
this is the part that traditional-thinking publishers will have trouble
accepting -- is that you are not just asking users to support your content, you
are asking them to support all the news and blog content online.
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view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
source materials retain original rights.]
Content Strategy — New York City
Group 4: You are: MALCOLM GLADWELL
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
“But if this bothers you, think about it for a minute. When you get your users
to sign up for Kachingle and start paying for content, you're helping lots of
other Web publishers. And as all those other Web publishers and bloggers
encourage their users to sign up for Kachingle, they are helping your site earn
more money. Call it the power of the commons. The winners are the blogs and Web
sites with the best content and that attract the most visitors and fans.
Newspaper sites can win at that game, right?
“Also, there's the social networking aspect of the Kachingle service, which
will use Facebook and Twitter, for instance, to spread the word. Let's take an
example in which I’m a paying Kachingler and I click the medallion on
Editorandpublisher.com to support it. Assuming I've approved this in my privacy
settings, Kachingle will note that "Steve Outing just became a financial
supporter of Editorandpublisher.com via Kachingle" (or wording along those
lines) and post it to my Twitter feed and my Facebook news feed, for my
followers and friends to see and be influenced by it.
The Google factor
“The new wave of micropayment promoters -- while genuine in their desire to
save the jobs of journalists and stop the decline in the quality of journalism
resulting from newspaper layoffs, cutbacks and bankruptcies -- is actually
suggesting something that will dig an even deeper hole for the newspaper
industry.
“A significant problem with micropayments is that it walls off content and
makes it difficult to share with others and spread it around the Web. If I like
an article and promote it in one of my Twitter posts, many of the people will
not read it if they encounter a pay demand even for 5 cents; it's a barrier
that will turn many away, especially if to get to the article the prospective
user first has to sign up for some content payment network account. If I've
paid 5 cents to read an article and want to promote it to my social network
friends or followers, will the URL that I share even work? Perhaps not if the
publisher hasn't set up the system to account for that. Internet users from
other countries may not be able to access the content at all because they can't
sign up for the micropayment system.
“And of course there's Google, and the various news and blog search services.
Will they index your content if it's behind a micropayment pay wall? If Google
can't point people to your content, you may as well not be on the Web. And
you're out of business.
You have an answer, now run with it
“Recently, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller wrote in his column some
answers from readers about why NYTimes.com doesn't charge for its content.
(You'll recall its TimesSelect paid-content experiment with Op-Ed columnists
and archives put on a subscription plan, which failed to bring in enough
revenue so was scrapped for a return to free content, more readers and more ad
dollars.) Keller said he favors the general idea of Times online content being
paid for by consumers who value it, but leaves an open mind about what approach
to take.
…
“I think that Keller and other newspaper editors, struggling to survive a nasty
downturn in print revenues and unable to find a way to adequately replace them
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To
view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
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Content Strategy — New York City
Group 4: You are: MALCOLM GLADWELL
The Paid Content Debate
2/13/16
on the digital publishing side, would approve of the Kachingle approach. That
is, if they can get their minds past the hurdle of the payment for their
content being voluntary, and that their content payment is mixed up in the big
pile of money with all sorts of publishers, down to the pajama blogger.
Otherwise, the Kachingle approach addresses Keller's concerns about stifled
traffic, search engines and fleeing advertisers.
…”
—Steve Outing, founder of Digital Media Test Kitchen at U Colorado Boulder,
etc. (Editor & Publisher, 2/10/2009)
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/stopthepresses_display.jsp?vnu_
content_id=1003940234
FOR DISCUSSION
General:

Will the model work?

How will it affect your persona’s enterprise? [For Malcolm Gladwell,
discuss start-ups or new content distribution models generally.]

How will it affect web infrastructure?

How will it affect web-related industry in general?

How will it affect content itself?

How will it affect content professionals?
Specific:

What are the hidden agendas of these bloggers?

Is there a theoretical relationship between the “social networking” or
shared content model and the “content wants to be free” argument?

Where does branded content fit in? Do users care about the sourcing of
their content? Do they care about its reliability and accuracy? How do
the revenue models affect content quality?

Is Malcolm Gladwell really an intellectual? Or does he just talk a good
game?
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To
view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. [Attribution: Elena Melendy, Nitid LLC. All
source materials retain original rights.]