Content needs paying for but is a paywall the best solution?
With The Times' paywall coming down today, its an interesting time to see if 'paying for news' will pay for publishers.
At the moment there seem to be two camps...
In the red corner the journalists complaining about the free nature of the Internet which is removing the value (and money) from their profession.
In the blue corner (which seems to be quite a lot bigger) are readers who say - why should I pay someone when I can get news for free?
So in my role as being stuck in the middle here's my pennyworth.
It is very clear that if humans are spending their time and using their skills to produce something then they need to be paid. A journalist cannot pop into Tescos and attempt to pay for the weeks shopping with a list of twitter followers and a few #ff mentions. There needs to be a way of converting these ephemeral things into cold hard cash which means someone (i.e. me and you) are going to have to pay.
Therefore it makes sense for a newspaper which is used to charging for the production of its news in the physical world to want to start charging for news on-line.
We need to find a way to monetise the content of publishers so that they can continue to pay journalists, reporters and their entire empire of staff and so maintain production of this content.
If getting paid is the problem is having a paywall the solution?
The main problem I see is that of understanding what 'news' is. Just as not everything on the Internet is free, not everything in a newspaper is actually news. Equally not a great deal of the 'news' bits of a paper are even written by that newspaper with lots being agency copy, or mildly rehashed copy from other places. In fact a large percentage of actual original copy in a paper isn't really 'news' at all it being columnist material and this is where the paywall arguments become interesting.
Articles written in-house by experts who understand their field provide 'exclusive' content but most of the content of your average paper is available from so many other places I can't see the point in paying for it.
So, if there are only 2-3 unique bits of The Times I want to read today and Mr Murdoch is going to charge £1 then each article is costing me 50p. The fact there are 100's of other bits 'available' is irrelevant. If I don't want them they are worthless.
So, has The Times got it right?
In my view, no. The problem with the paywall system is that it trying to impose the Newspaper model of selling onto the Internet. The Times assumes that people want to buy the whole paper and read it cover to cover – just like they do with their normal daily paper. But on the Internet everyone can be much more picky. If we don't like Robert Peston's view on the economy we can find someone else we prefer. If we don't like A A Gill's reviews we can read someone else's. The Internet gives us the freedom to be promiscuous with our reading habits and The Times' paywall is trying to stop us.
Take for example the interview with
This is a huge waste of money and resources and the current paywall model seems to be trying to translate this waste onto the Internet.
So what is the solution?
I feel what we need is a system allowing us to pay on a per article basis (probably around 10-20p) per article and for us to get a nice monthly bill itemising what we had read and charging us accordingly – A bit like oh, our mobile phone bill!
Papers could then sell individual articles at 10% of the cost of the paper rather than try to sell an entire paper. Given the reduction in manufacturing and distribution costs a consumer reading 2 articles at 10p will probably generate as much profit as the buyer of a whole paper.
The best analogy I can think of would be the 'Now that's what I call music' albums. Why on earth would you pay £9, £10 or even £5 for a 2 CD pack which had 4 tracks you wanted and 34 you couldn't care less about when you can already download the four tracks for 99p each from iTunes and leave the rest of the rubbish alone?
Journalists whose articles were sold in this way would be able to measure (and be measured on) how popular they are and how much they actually contribute to their paper. Maybe a meritocracy amongst journalists will be the result?
The main advantages I could see would be;
1) I can read one article from The Times, one from The Guardian and maybe one or two others for less than a single subscription to any one paper
2) The papers will know which of their contributors are paying their way
3) Contributors can promote their content on blogs, twitter or facebook and actually be helping themselves and their employers to earn a living.
4) If there was a referral system (like adsense or similar) then other sites and blogs would actually have incentives to link to the original content rather than attempt to steal the content and republish it - If you make linking to content profitable then why steal it? Funnily enough this ability to link to content rather than have to duplicate it everywhere was the original point of the web protocols!
5) Just as iTunes has increased the number of tracks sold and the amount spent on music, then a pay per article system may actually increase the amount spent by consumers on news.
What about the poor 'news' team who's content is available anywhere and therefore 'worthless'
Well it does seem strange that any pay-per-read system might actually switch the priorities around. Instead of being news first and columnist padding second this system probably reflects a switch of priorities in supply and demand. There are many ways to find out what the FTSE100 is doing but only one Jeremy Clarkson (thankfully) so the paper that 'owns' him has a commodity that no-one else can replicate. Any paper needs both but instead of the news team subsidising expensive columnists it'll be the expensive columnists who'll be expected to draw readers towards the 'public service' news element.
Will The Times Succeed?
Well I hope not. Not because I don't like Mr Murdoch or because I don't like paying for content but because I think the paywall system is bad in the long term for content payment in general and we need to find a model that best matches the way the Internet user actually uses the Internet.
The paywall systems seem to me to be a step backward towards the old AOL, Compuserve models of private content and if the Internet shows us one thing it is that backwards is rarely the best direction to be heading.
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