Information wants to be Expensive – Warning: Paywall Ahead

Gordon Crovitz, co-founder of Journalism Online, is convinced: we have to grow into a paid model for online news content. The only question is how. Yesterday, at the Aspen Institute Forum on Communication and Society (FOCAS), he asked for cooperation between publishers in a number of experiments and research. If they would share their best practices among each other on a common platform (and they would be more than willing to do so, Crovitz said), then they would all be able to get new businesses rolling. ”Information might want to be free, but according to Stewart Brand it also wants to be expensive, if it is there in the right time and on the right place.”

Important in this respect is that the consumers need to get value for money. But if so, they would be happy to pay for it, according to Crovitz. He came up with some stunning data to support that feeling. Research by Journalism Online points out that at this moment 6% of the audience is paying for online news, but that as much as 92% would be willing to pay; an average of 25 dollar per month that would be.

If that were true, newspapers would be out of trouble by the end of the month. But Steve Outing – also at FOCAS – was quick to get some much needed nuance in the paid content debate. He put the publishers back on earth by saying that even if 90% of the publishers would get their content behind some sort of paywall, “the other 10% would become very popular”. Moreover, it would be an open invitation for “emerging news replacement entities”, the newcomers. And if that wouldn’t cause enough trouble in itself, Outing expressed his strong belief that most people would settle for a lower quality, if it would be free. Oh and by the way, the younger internet users will never pay, even if they grow older. Which leaves the publishers with the fact that their paywall strtategy will only attract some older users. “At best only a tiny percentage will pay, so you will need a huge audience”.

A metered paywall will punish your best customers, Outing stresses. Moreover, there will be lots of attempts to circumvent the paywall, especially if a limited amount of the content will remain free. Outing’s presentation wasn’t all negative about payments on the internet, though.  ”The Freemium strategy has great promise, if you do it right. And that is, by being compatible with retaining advertisers, retaining Google-juice, looking for reader-support solutions and including syndication strategies.”

There is even more, Outing says. Think about group subscriptions, tipping and donations, network donation schemes and the news-everywhere strategy. Some are more likely to succeed than others, he says, but all those possibilities have to be attempted somehow.

Most striking is Outing’s plea for – what publishers tend to call – content abuse. “Turn that negative approach into something positive. Getting others to publish our content offers a huge opportunity. Make money from them!”