Paying the Freight of Content Development
Rupert Murdoch announced this morning that News Corp will be charging readers for internet content.
Now ain't that a surprise? (That's sarcasm), BTW).
News Corp is the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily Post, The Times of London, MySpace, The Fox Broadcasting Network and media outlets around the world. It is unique in that it is pretty much the only multimedia company still making a profit, although those profits are not as big as they once were. Mr. Murdoch doesn't like not making as much money as he was a year ago, so he's doing something about it.
The Wall Street Journal has been charging for internet access for some time and they are making good money at it. A few other publications have toyed with it, but people said bad things about them so they stopped. Murdoch doesn't care what you think because he knows what he is producing is what people want and need.
This move is what the print media world has been waiting for: Someone to take the lead and find a new financial model. No one has really wanted to be first out of the block, but now an 800-pound gorilla has taken then initiative and you can expect things to move fairly quickly.
Now you may wonder what this has to do with you. After all, you get most of your information from Google, right? Well, Google doesn't produce that information. They channel it from places that do, like News Corp entities.
You won't be able to find much for free on the internet, other than amateur video and corporate news releases (badly written ones) that give you no real information. You are going to have to start paying for the real stuff now and that means you are going to start caring if that information is quality of corporate fluff. You are going to start paying attention to positions and facts that may not line up with what you already believe. And if you don't think you are getting it from that source of information, you're going to take your business elsewhere. You are going to want your news straight and true.
Ah, but you say you are an engineer and don't really care about the Wall Street Journal. Guess what, EE Times has been mulling over this same concept. Now that the gorilla has taken the plunge, expect Techinsights to be close behind. And if they are the only one, they may end up to be the only game in town. Portable Design closed down this week and from what I'm hearing on the street, we'll be losing a second publication by the end of July.
What this will mean for media companies following this model is their circulations will start to drop, but their revenue will start to climb... because they won't be dependent on advertising for revenue anymore. And the people reading the publication will be motivated to consume the content.
What this will mean for the PR world, is that practitioners will have to go back to the ethics of their business and point out crap when they see it and their clients are going to have to accept the definition. We're actually going to have to start delivering substance in our communications, not technical trivia.
People are going to scream bloody murder over this, but that's life, ain't it.
Lou, A very fascinating post. Especially since the future of journalism was a big topic at the SF NewComm Forum last week. As the number of reporters and news organizations constricts, the other trend I see emerging is companies becoming their own news bureau. They are accomplishing this by adding a social media release, a blog post, and an article quality version of their news, then pushing this directly to their audience via PPC and SEO. It will be interesting to see how these two trends play out.
ReplyDeleteGreat! That will fix the Pub Bore tendency in the marketing and PR professions, who believe in fixing journalists/ customers with their beady eye and delivering The Message.
ReplyDeleteThe only way to fund the generation of good content is to have readers contribute to the cost. It's also the first step along the road to reviving demand for advertising.
Good content means eyeballs and eyeballs means advertising IF you can tell advertisers who those eyeballs belong to. One of the reasons we've got ourselves into this pickle, I think, is because there was too little investment in readership research to really make the media's value proposition stand up. The number of times I hear clients say 'I don't believe in spending £x,000 on advertising' truly scares me - but they need a better argument than 'If you don't there won't be any publications to get PR in' to secure a budget.
You're absolutely right about the business case, but we'll see how this plays out. Plenty of people read FT and the Economist online rather than the WSJ since they're equally authoritative and free. I MIGHT pay to read the WSJ, but sure as hell not Fox or the Daily Post, both of which are commodities. Being free is a big competitive advantage if you don't go broke in the process.
ReplyDeleteSteve Farnsworth makes a good point. I think you'll see more and more vendors doing their own publications, like Mentor Graphics' EDA Tech Journal, Xilinx' Xcell Journal and Rich Goering's corporate blog for Cadence. But this really blurs the line between marketing and journalism, no matter how much editorial integrity you bring to the table.
Guru blogs, supported by sponsors, are a viable model with a future, though they won't support a big corporate overhead. It remains to be seen if they can scale. Maybe they don't need to, you just need enough to cover the major niches.