Bo Sacks’ email from last night picks up a good piece by Peter Houston, in which he summarizes some studies on reader needs. They include …
- Update me
- Educate me
- Divert me
- Give me perspective
- Keep me on trend
Those are all good, but I would add one thing to that – save me some time doing it. Get to the point, and make it simple.
A second model looks at the question slightly differently, and comes up with these four needs.
- Know
- Understand
- Feel
- Do
I like those, and I’m going to write them on my whiteboard and keep them in mind for my own editorial strategy.
But what’s really been on my mind recently is the revenue side of this problem, because if publisher A does all those things well, and charges for access, but publisher B does all those things adequately for free, publisher B is going to win. And that stinks.
At the MACMA conference last week, Jim McKelvey outlined a new revenue model for his Invisibly app. He’s starting with the assumption that good journalism costs money, but he’s being upfront about monetization. He’s giving readers three choices for how to pay for content in the app.
- The app can monetize their information, like everybody else does.
- Users can volunteer information (for example, I earned 3 points this morning by answering a question about coffee). Or …
- Users can simply pay for content.
This is a great experiment, and I wish Jim well with it.
Here’s the problem. These things are all true.
- Creating good content costs money.
- The advertising model is awful – in many ways.
- Many readers will not pay for a subscription. (Jim estimates only 20% will.)
- Most internet users resent the monetization of their personal information.
Take all four together, and it’s clear that we need a new revenue model to pay for content.
I’m an advocate of paywalls, but I also understand that doesn’t work for everybody.
We need something else. Jim and his crew are trying find it, but it would be great if we had 20 other teams working the problem.
So … what’s your solution?
