Tag Archives: freemium

A step in the wrong direction for paid content…

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I think it’s important that new generations look into alternate ways of doing everything – specifically in this post though I’m talking about ways copywriters can make money from their content. Businesses need to seek out people with ideas that don’t stick to the status quo because when people get into a habit or a life style, it’s hard for them to get out of it.

There’s this new company that’s in the talking stages with various websites, Journalism Online, who has noticed that advertising revenues just aren’t cutting it any more, and paper sales of publishers’ content isn’t selling as much thanks to the Internet. That’s a valid and real problem for the media world. Their solution? Charge people to read the content. That’s an outdated monetisation method that just won’t work.

The reason it’s been chosen is that Journalism Online is headed by three people all of which are from the biz. Former producers, former executives. They’ve been around for years and charging people for the content is what’s comfortable for them, it’s what they know. But it’s an antiquated system which doesn’t follow along with the ethos of the Internet; “I’ll get it from some place else for free.”

Ars seems to think this is viable because some other publishers are already doing this and quite successfully. The Economist charges more than $100 a year for subscriptions and that’s where they make the bulk of their money (which is odd in an industry where advertising revenue is the biggest earner typically).

The Economist‘s demographic is high salaried, business minded, career orientated, older people. Eventually, those people will die. Younger people – the people who business always want to target – aren’t getting their news from paper-based publications; they’re getting it from the Internet. For free. And they become to expect that. Users get really annoyed when things change (Facebook homepage update, LiveJournal’s shift to Basic and Plus accounts a while ago, Twitter stopping sending SMSs to UK phones, take your pick for an example), and going from getting our news for free to having to start paying for a subscription for the same thing we’ve been getting for years makes us angry.

Journalism Online‘s approach to changing websites that we use everyday will work for a short while – whilst the people that are used to paying are still buying. But when they stop, you’ll have no customers left.

How Google should make money

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Ages ago I did a post on how ad-funded services were likely to die off, and other methods of monetization that people could use. I didn’t even think about how all that would affect Google until I just noticed a post on valleywag regarding them making more of their services paid for.

That really doesn’t surprise me though; Google is the prefect company to be making money through freemium services. At the moment they’re focusing mainly on the business markets, which makes sense since they have more motivation to pay for a service and they’ll also need better customer support which comes at a price, and they know it. No feathers are ruffled there.

It just makes sense to charge those guys.

How about making money from us individuals using freemium revenue sources?

I’d be pretty pissed if Google Reader started limiting the number of feeds I can subscribe to, unless I paid $5 a month. It’s not that the service isn’t worth paying for – I love it, it’s been my  homepage for the past few years – but there are alternatives out there that I could easily switch to. If all else fails, I could just program my own. I wouldn’t put up with having to pay for it.

So how can Google make money from it, that isn’t advertising (which they don’t)?

We can just go back to the idea of charging businesses, or power users. I know that some of the blog author’s that I read use Google Reader for research and second-hand-news purposes (which most of it is on the internet, like this post for instance). I’m sure if Google paneled them they’d find a whole host of features that reports need and are willing to pay for in order for their job to be easier or for them to produce better content, finding news quicker.

There could be a feature for paid users only which gives links and citation data to other websites and even news papers which Google have archived. They have all the known internet at their finger tips, why not tell the people looking for it about it? They could order these links by the sentiments of the pages; are you looking for pages pro-, or anti-Apple? is the author liberal or conservative? Those kinds of things would help authors do their job, and I’m sure Gawker or Wired wouldn’t mind paying for it. Hell, if I could afford it, I’d get it for when I (very occasionally) do reviews on here.

So, again I’ve come to the conclusion that service providers should charge their business and pro-users, becuase they aren’t willing to leave. Give them a few nicher features and you’re good to go.