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The newspapers are just going to do the obvious, they will have free and premium content with a monthly subscription.
The big media companies like Fairfax will bundle all kinds of premium content under one subscription. I guess it will be like a pay tv model.
This is basically the "pay what you like" monetization that Radiohead used - 60-65% paid nothing and the rest paid an average of $6 (30% of market price). Personally, I feel that this is not sustainable. Newspaper monetization could be in the form of customized filtering. While many companies try to provide such a service, the quality isn't high enough that someone would pay from it.
How high does the quality have to be before the average user pays for it?
The only thing I can imagine could save online newspapers is, that they will become better and better in quality, that will attract many visitors, and the website will survive by ads revenue.
IMHO the core problem is, that the World Wide Web was not created with the intention that it should provide business opportunities. It was mainly established for free exchange of information between scholars and scientists.
Later on, some people and companies discovered that Internet has monetization potential and so the .com companies emerged. Some were successful, other weren't. But nobody said every kind of business can survive on the Internet - WWW has it own principles, and if you don't play by it's rules, you might not survive. And, one of that core principles which lies in the very heart of WWW is that information is passed for free. I don't think any company has the power to change that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How high does the quality have to be before the average user pays for it?
The average user won't pay no matter how high the quality is if they can get it for free otherwise.
Hopefully, the premium-based-monetization services would make more money and expand faster than those with the free model.
This is basically the "pay what you like" monetization that Radiohead used - 60-65% paid nothing and the rest paid an average of $6 (30% of market price). Personally, I feel that this is not sustainable. Newspaper monetization could be in the form of customized filtering. While many companies try to provide such a service, the quality isn't high enough that someone would pay from it.
30% of the price a consumer would have paid in the traditional model. In all probability even accounting for costs this represented a huge increase in profit per unit sold for the band itself.
This is basically the "pay what you like" monetization that Radiohead used - 60-65% paid nothing and the rest paid an average of $6 (30% of market price). Personally, I feel that this is not sustainable. Newspaper monetization could be in the form of customized filtering. While many companies try to provide such a service, the quality isn't high enough that someone would pay from it.
How high does the quality have to be before the average user pays for it?
Ideally, I would get all news/articles relevant to me within 10 minutes and this would probably save me 50 minutes every day. Personally, I would pay if the service if saved me a significant amount of time and had the absence of articles of which I was not interested.
This is basically the "pay what you like" monetization that Radiohead used - 60-65% paid nothing and the rest paid an average of $6 (30% of market price). Personally, I feel that this is not sustainable. Newspaper monetization could be in the form of customized filtering. While many companies try to provide such a service, the quality isn't high enough that someone would pay from it.
That seems lower than one might hope for as a content producer but maybe higher than an average consumer might want to pay as per month - about the right number? It makes sense that as the market approaches perfect competition (no barriers to entry, no information inequalities, no transport costs) it gets pretty hard to make abnormal returns - supply just ramps up until there is less per head.
This could be a nice channel for incentivising content that doesn't work well with an advertising model, for example RSS feeds. It'll be interesting to see whether they can market this well enough though.
Two reasons off the top of my head: Where's the value in signing up for Kachingle? What do consumers get? Assuaging of guilt? If Kachingle negotiated so that every Kachingle publisher had Kach-only (or otherwise paid only) content, it could work as a giant "subscription fee to everything". But Kach would need a lot of traction to get heavyweights like the NYT to make some content only available to Kachingle users.
Second - privacy. I'm not Captain Uber Security online, but I don't want my credit card and favorite reading online linked. I've seen too many companies abuse user data to be excited about telling Kachingle/AMEX/whoever else exactly what I like reading and my interests are. Ultra-targeted demographic based advertisements all over the internet does not appeal to me.
Data. Hard facts. I'd much prefer to pay to access something like AP's newswire, where I can get a lot more salient information without having it regurgitated by someone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How high does the quality have to be before the average user pays for it?
The average user won't pay no matter how high the quality is if they can get it for free otherwise.
Part of that is that I spend 12-15 hours a day on my computer for my job and side projects... being able to go outside and read my news on paper is a welcome break from that.
But the other part is that I find the reporting to be of generally high quality and depth. I think the print media that is hurt the most by the Internet are those with shorter stories and lots of ads in between. The Internet does this bite-sized content extremely well, so traditional media will have a hard time competing, but there is still demand for longer, in depth content, which is (so far) best supplied by paid reporters.