I'm not sure I buy the claim that American papers are simply behind the curve on the Internet. The NYT has run a great site for years, yet they're still on the brink of bankruptcy. The problem seems to be more fundamental. Even with the large audience major newspaper sites draw, advertising revenue or subscriptions just don't pull in enough money to replace the old combination of geographic monopoly and classified ads.
Agreed. Why aren't they looking to the product side of things?
The main business of newspapers was always just getting the info from A to B. I had a reporter friend who used to compare his job to working on the docks. Some fire would break out, and he'd be sent to "unload" the news from the fire department and the usual shocked-and-stunned families and the neighbors, and boom, file his story. And this was when newspapers were actually good.
By the 1990s, newspapers had virtually no useful content left. It was just a habit for some readers, and a local monopoly for certain forms of advertising. Newspapers had been consolidated to the point where local news was dreadful to non-existent, and most of the paper was filled with bland wire stories and syndicated columnists of no particular merit. The one thing you really needed the newspaper for was classified ads, and the internet killed that pretty quickly.
People are willing to pay more for actually rare information. Nouriel Roubini, the economist, runs a paid newsletter to people who want to hear his contrarian views.
Furthermore, there's a huge gap in local news these days. Local government, schools -- all this stuff that really matters to people has no medium any more.
My local government uses Twitter. I have been following them for a while now and I'm generally pleased with how it works. They tend to tweet a lot of dull things like links to meeting minutes, but how interesting can local government really be?
It came in handy a while back when I woke up to find out that a street was closed due to emergency water line maintenance. Sure it's just a little thing, but it saved me five minutes of finding out the hard way during my commute.
> Furthermore, there's a huge gap in local news these days. Local government, schools -- all this stuff that really matters to people has no medium any more.
In Minneapolis & St. Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood and specialty newspapers are still prevalent, numerous, and of good quality. A real joy to read compared with the neighborhood papers of New York City. But, then, I guess the Twin Cities has a culture of indie publishing.
Wannabe indie publishers are everywhere. What I suspect is that they somehow cracked the advertising problem for such small publications. Maybe an ad co-op?
Problem #1, they did not port classified adds to the internet.
Problem #2, it's a free website that requires registration to view add supported content without providing a reason to register.
Problem #3, high cost of content. It might not cost much to show a page but creating it costs more than user or software generated sites.
Solution: Either drop the registration or add some social aspect that uses the registration. If someone stumbles on a NYT article from Google and needs to register to view other pages there is a problem.
PS: Advertising is the only form of micro payments of the web deal with it or develop something new.
Explicit is better, but you can tell a lot about someone by tracking their page views and click throughs. I remember seeing an article/presentation, "How to tell I'm a girl", but I cant find the reference. Some of it is pretty simple. If they are reading the sports page, they might be interested in sports. There is a bit of a problem with single computer households, but not huge.
The main thing is get engagement first; ask for the registration later.
I agree that these are issues with the NYT website, but I'm not sure that they'd be a success even if they had classifieds (Craigslist?) or removed registration. Even with registration, they're consistently one of the most popular news sites. Traffic isn't the issue. The problem is that traffic alone isn't worth much anymore.
Commodifies, not devalues. Devaluing something makes it less useful for the person buying it eg Mexico devaluing the peso. Commodifying makes it cheaper to produce by making distribution and/or manufacture more efficient, eg Tata figuring out how to make a car for one lahk.
The real danger is that Google is becoming the sole market maker for advertising, which means they can extract almost all value from the transactions.
This is like someone in 1780 arguing that industrialization devalues everything it touches. Yes, some senses. But the world is net better off. And more important, there is no going back.
People will pay. They care about hassle more than money. I absolutely detest the process of creating an account at a site to see content, and I use bugmenot all the time for free sites. However, I pay a decent chunk of change for a subscription to ft.com. When I find content I like, I want to subsidize the creation of more by the same creator. Micropayments and subscription models are the way of the future. Newspaper sites should support both models and let readers use either.
