Comments on: Price Discriminate! The economics of charging for online content

By: Martin Stabe

Martin Stabe — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 06:45:28 +0000

Isn’t this more or less the Financial Times’ model?

It gives away its online content to occasional visitors and those coming in via search to maximise traffic and volume ad revenue, but requires registration after x story views per month and paid subscription after x+y story views per month.

By: Stephen Larson

Stephen Larson — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 06:44:38 +0000

Our experience with community newspapers is that online subscription pricing is relatively inelastic (unlike your graph). This means that a lower price will NOT produce more subscribers and a higher price (within reason) will NOT reduce subscribers.

Our theory is that potential subscribers must be convinced the service is unique and no free sources exist and that they will use the service frequently before they will pay anything. Once they are convinced then price is not really the issue.

Community newspapers (weeklies focused on a specific locality in our case) typically do not have many competitors in the locality they serve so the uniqueness is not a problem.

We put every story published in print and more online but charge for just the “current” stories. Archived stories are open to the public and completely indexed by Google so when people search local issues covered they discover the website. We believe that after running into the website enough times, potential subscribers come to see that it does offer information they will use. When they see the current news is for subscribers only, they don’t have a problem paying $26 per year for the online edition (the same price as the print edition).

By: Greg Linch

Greg Linch — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 04:11:33 +0000

I think this is a good way to start moving the conversation forward, but we need to extend the online revenue discussion beyond premium/paid content and display advertising.

From Spot.Us to Chachingle to an idea Steve Outing mentioned on a Journalism Now podcast: news organizations helping small businesses in the community set up Web sites.

It’s completely cliche, but we really need to be thinking outside the box. Especially the paid content box.

By: Albert Sun

Albert Sun — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:48:51 +0000

Andrew,

It would definitely be harder for smaller newspapers to produce premium content, but I think what premium content is can scale down too into simpler and less expensive things too. They’ll likely have to shrink traditional news hole and supplement it by aggregating from other sites to implement this model.

On the other side, the smallest papers are also the least likely to need this because they have the least competition for advertisers.

By: Andrew Dunn

Andrew Dunn — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:31:06 +0000

I’m not convinced this will work for too many papers. For the NYT, I think this could be a viable option. The “premium” content they had the first try — opinion, mostly — just wasn’t worth paying for.

But for smaller papers, I don’t see this as an option. From what I’ve seen, they have enough trouble filling news hole and wouldn’t be able to produce any “premium” content.