Wow, what a miraculous and sudden revival of talking about paying for news Web sites, mostly provoked by the severe corporate chest pains being experienced by The New York Times.
Some of the eminences (some might say dinosaurs, but we’ll leave that for a separate discussion) of the news industry have weighed in on the side of some form of subscription wall and/or micropayments, including Walter Isaacson, Steve Brill, and even the Times’s own managing editor Bill Keller. Most aren’t well versed in the realities of online consumer behavior (people hate micropayments and always will), or even of doing a P&L for an online business. Brill, for example, actually multiplies the Times’s 20 million current monthly users times $2/month each to do a revenue estimate for his subscription plan. I haven’t seen math like that since the height of dotcom craziness ten years ago.
Despite the bad subscription and micropayment ideas out there, I’m still a believer in subscriptions, and think that more publications can have it both ways, as Chris Anderson suggested in the WSJ – plenty of content for free, and a supplementary subscription business for extra revenue. WSJ.com, my old stomping ground, continues to do a great job of having its cake and eating it too – much of the news is available for free, but the mysterious quantity that’s behind the wall still generates significant subscription revenue. The Times still takes unjustified derision (from Google-worshippers and other free-content gurus) for having created, and then killed, TimesSelect – its premium tier of subscription-only content that “only” brought in $10 million in revenue. Might have been the wrong execution, but the basic idea is still worth plenty of additional experimentation.
The challenge for sites that don’t have the clout of the WSJ or the Times is to make subscribing easy, seamless, cheap and painless — and ideally, as I’ve noted here before, it’d be great to have one easy subscription payment cover a whole variety of sites. For example, I’m never going to pay to subscribe to my local paper’s awful Web site – but I wouldn’t mind (I guess) if they secretly got a piece of a more general payment I was making for access to a whole range of sites that I like more.
That’s why I like the sound of something like Kachingle (well, the concept, not the name), the subject of Steve Outing’s excellent column this week. It sounds a lot like what I’ve been hoping for: a subscription MetroCard that works seamlessly across all sort of sites. You register once, voluntarily (more on this in a second) designate a monthly Kachingle payment, and when you visit sites that display the Kachingle banner, each site receives (behind the scenes) a share of your monthly fee, based on its share of your visits during the month. The idea is that the content on participating sites remains free, but that there will be enough paying paying members out there to generate some revenue for your site. Like public radio, most people will be listening to you for free, but some listeners (readers) will decide (via Kachingle) to pay you some money. “Crowdfunding,” they call it. Cute.
This isn’t a perfect concept (frankly, even the Kachingle Web site doesn’t really work yet), and like any payment scheme, we could all critique it endlessly. For example, I’m not sure why it has to be completely voluntary — why can’t publishers designate certain content as only for paying Kachingle users? I’m also wondering if Kachingle has any customer research or experience that suggests Kachingle would actually “work” in the real world. But for the time being, I agree with Outing, it seems like a great idea that I hope some publishers try.
Subscriptions aren’t the only place newspapers can turn to help themselves out. They can invent new, more useful print products; re-think what newspeople can and should be doing these days; invent and sell more of the marketing services local businesses need (there are plenty); explore premium vertical content. But the idea of collecting revenue from some users isn’t crazy. Here’s hoping more people try it – in inventive, creative, realistic ways.
