A Genuinely Amazing Music Site

Sometimes people ask me, “Is there anything new online that has totally amazed you?” Usually I fumble around for an answer, and look a little dumb. Not much amazes me, I guess. But right now, I do have an answer: the Berlin Philharmonic’s online concert hall.

I should start by noting that I have been going to orchestra concerts for 40 years, but I’ve never been a fan of TV broadcasts (the awful “Great Performances” stuff on PBS) or even concert DVDs. Not only are they extremely limited in terms of selection, but the impact of actually being in the hall has almost always been completely missing. But for some reason I can’t quite explain, the online experience they’ve created in Berlin feels completely different to me. Seeing these concerts on a good monitor and audio system on my desk has an immediacy I have never felt from TV or DVD. (Maybe I should sit as close to my TV as I do to the monitor.) The quality of the HD photography and sound is stunning, as is the engineering and lavish design of the site itself. It helps, of course, that the Berlin Philharmonic is an exceptional institution – musicians, programming, conductors, concert hall. Just about every concert is worth the time. You should visit the actual site, but here’s a sample of the music (make sure you switch to HD, and full screen).

For about $200 a year, you can watch any Berlin concert live online, or whenever you want via the comprehensive archive. There are also monthly passes, online tickets for individual concerts, all clearly explained. If there’s a live concert coming up, you’ll see a countdown clock on the upper right. Thinking about buying a ticket to this weekend’s concert? You can watch a couple of minutes of the rehearsal earlier in the week, to see if you like the music. As I said: Wow.

You can imagine some nice features the site doesn’t have – I might like to listen to the audio of these concerts on an iPod, for example. But that’s trivial compared with what has been accomplished.

I can’t imagine how much it cost to develop all this, or to produce a multi-camera, broadcast-quality video of each concert on an ongoing basis. On the other hand, what other future for orchestras is there? Most are still primarily focused on filling up two thousand seats in a physical hall for each concert, which of course is an admirable and perhaps necessary goal. But if it’s listeners you want, and paying listeners, with this site we can now see the spectacular new model for how and where to find them.

Interesting Magazine Paid-Content Models – And One Bad One

Steve Smith at minonline has a nice post with five interesting examples of magazines that have developed new approaches to online paid content. With one exception (PC magazine’s digital edition – more on that in a minute), they get past the idea that magazines’ online premium products have to be online “editions” of the magazine. Instead, they’re mostly new product concepts entirely.

Will they succeed? They have a better chance than just putting the stories from a print product behind a pay wall. Useful premium databases, “membership”-oriented services and communities, alerting tools, and bundles of online and offline content have higher odds of generating significant online revenue.

I do have to grouse that I ended up with a paid subscription to one of these products, PC magazine’s online edition, and I hated the thing. I used to like the now-dead print PC magazine, but it seems pointless to replicate print so slavishly, using the clumsy Zinio reader with its associated password/account frustrations and endless zooming in and zooming out to read something. I’ve always been a nay-sayer on “digital editions” of print, but people still keep trying this. Zinio must have great salespeople, because publishers are paying them good money to create these resuscitated corpses of print products. I just don’t get the appeal. If you know of anyone making real money with this, I’d love to hear about it.

The Truth About Citizen Journalism

In the midst of an interesting roundup about how local newspaper sites might showcase local bloggers, Simon Owens has some great comments from Tony Pierce of the L.A. Times, including this one:

“For the most part, this whole citizen journalism concept is fine for about three or four people per town, but that’s about it,” he said. “And most of those people are not journalists for a reason. Either they’re crappy writers or they’re crazy, which makes for sometimes interesting blog posts, but is that something that a major newspaper would link to?”

In the abstract it sounds like a great (and cheap) idea to populate a local news site with a feed of local blogs – but unless someone is picking those “three or four” people who really know what they’re talking about, the aggregation itself isn’t much of a service.

Another Scary Online-Only News Business Plan

Earlier this week, All Things Digital at The Wall Street Journal posted an interesting spreadsheet that tried to answer the question: What would your P&L look like with a 20-person local online-only news site?

Mark Josephson of local content aggregator Outside.in, the author of the spreadsheet, concluded that with very aggressive traffic assumptions, lots of help from third-party sites, and most inventory filled as remnant space by ad networks, you could have a margin of over 40%. Not bad. However, the fact is it’s a pretty small business overall — $6 million in revenue total, and only $1.4 million of that sold locally by a sales staff.

You could argue about some of the assumptions (especially what look like optimistic traffic numbers), but the fact is, Josephson is right. If you are building a local online news business from scratch, and you are only thinking about selling traditional banner inventory as your revenue source, any spreadsheet you do will look much like his.

Here’s the question: If you had a site like the one in the spreadsheet, with 40 million monthly pageviews, that would mean you have to be in a fairly large city (Dallas maybe? the local news site there probably has about this traffic level). If you were in a city that big, with that visible a site, why would you settle for $1.4 million in local ad revenue, when the market of local ad dollars is so much larger? Why have a local sales force, if all they can sell is banners?

Local advertising spending overall is down recently, like everything else. But everyone I’ve spoken to who has tried to sell to local advertisers recently tells me that even now, they are more than willing to try new opportunities if they’re creatively packaged and affordable. They may not want to be in the local metro daily (since it’s probably declining in readership, drab, and overpriced). But they still need to generate customers. They’re willing to try everything from Web ads to local weeklies, coupon books, event sponsorships, e-mail marketing, merchant directories, SEM. If you want a chance at a serious and prosperous local media company, you’ll need more than a busy Web site — you’ll have to build up a much richer range of channels and solutions for advertisers.

The opportunity is there for a local media company to be the authority on how to target customers in that market, via whatever channels local merchants want, whether it’s print, online, event sponsorships, e-mail, or access to a deep and proprietary local marketing database. Not that it’s easy to do, but it’s the only way to get away from the “little business in a huge market” suggested by the Josephson spreadsheet.

Some Sunlight on the Local News Scene

I try to look at every new local news/information site out there – blogs, wikis, newspaper sites. First, because I once thought of starting a business in this area (I still do now and then, but then I lie down and it passes). But second, because so many local news sites are so bad, depending on repurposed, stale newspaper content, sporadic blogs, or hole-ridden databases of local information, stores and vendors. I’m always looking for someone who has taken a fresh look at the problem of creating a genuinely useful local site.

Here’s one that works: Richmond Sunlight. This site consolidates and organizes everything you might want to know about the Virginia State Legislature – not just a news blog, but a database of every single bill on the legislature’s agenda and where it stands, as well as every legislator and his or her activities. You can search for a specific bill, easily find all bills on a particular topic, or get a customized RSS alerting you to every bill a particular legislator sponsors. Of course, there are also ongoing discussions of the merits of particular bills (see this furious exchange on dog tethering). Best of all, it’s all pulled together in a simple, appealing and immediately understandable interface.

What’s the business model? It’s a nonprofit, started by a local blogger but now owned by the Virginia Interfaith Center, staffed (says the site) with volunteers. Does that mean this isn’t relevant to a for-profit local news business? Not at all. Far too many local sites are depending on producing news — as in articles. Instead, they should be trying to build local tools – on local issues, real estate, business, stores, events – that people will depend on for all sorts of business and personal reasons. What’s appealing about this site – a deep and integrated database, exceptional ease of use, and a clear focus – could be part of anyone’s local information business, maybe especially one where you’re trying to make money.

Information Entrepreneurs: I’ve Got the Horse Right Here

Nice piece in the sports section of the New York Times last week about the Daily Racing Form, still thriving as a daily paper at $6/copy, with a growing online business. Think this is a weird anomaly, based on a unique hybrid of sports and gambling, with no lessons for other information companies? I would disagree.

Many people want to build Web news and information businesses these days based on minimal people costs, scraped or user-generated content, and tons of automated technology. That model can work, of course. But there are also still plenty of vertical businesses (based on specific industries, hobbies, etc.) that can be built based more on the unglamorous, often low-tech slog of collecting and packaging specialized news and data, and then charging for it. Take BidClerk.com, a Chicago publisher of construction project opportunities, selling memberships for the market-disrupting price of $50/month. Aggregating all those projects isn’t glamorous work, I’m sure, but it’s information that helps people make money – and therefore, information that they’ll pay for. Just like at the race track.

If ChicagoNow Is the Future of Newspapers, I’m Not Excited Yet

The Chicago Tribune just opened up its ChicagoNow.com site for a very early first look. Over at Recovering Journalist, Mark Potts says it’s “the future.” It’s still a work in progress, I know, but I wish I could get more excited about what’s there so far. Their promotional video says it will be the best of Huffington Post and Facebook rolled into a local package, and clearly they have high hopes that they’ve come up with a new approach to what a local news site can  be.

To me, despite some very attractive design work, so far it’s a low-tech letdown: Some interesting-looking bloggers holding forth on local topics, with a common registration system so you can register once and comment across the entire community.

But can blogs-and-comments, no matter how you package them, really make for a resource that penetrates enough of a local market to matter to advertisers? The promo video suggests there will be a lot more coming over time. I hope so, because until there is I’m not sure how they’re going to build scale.

OpenID Gets Closer to Real Usability

Until recently I hadn’t been impressed with the so-called “seamlessness” of how OpenID was going to make life easier for actual users trying to register on Web sites. But things may be starting to come together. RPX, for example, has commercialized a very easy OpenID login/registration interface. If you want to see it in action on a live site, go to UserVoice and register. It’s now not so hard to imagine a world where we have one identity and one password, linking not just all our social networks but all the content and commerce sites we have relationships with.

Now let’s use the same open-standard approach to make it easier for one e-commerce relationship to grant us easier access to premium content across sites, without having to make multiple individual subscription purchases.

(And by the way, if you are a connoisseur of elegant registration/purchase screens – you know who you are – UserVoice’s are beautifully designed, well engineered, and short.)

How About an Amazon Newspaper/Magazine E-commerce Plan?

Seth Godin, who has lots of advice for everyone and sometimes some good stuff, thinks Amazon should come up with a subscription plan for books.

While we’re at it, why shouldn’t Amazon be the central platform for buying subscriptions or one-time purchases of any kind of online content? They already run the world’s best information store – they’d make the buying experience easy, and bundle products/services together if it made sense for buyers. It would get publishers out of the business of running their own expensive, clunky registration, access control and billing platforms. There are plenty of ugly technology issues that would have to be worked out, but not as ugly as the buying process is today for most online information customers.

And I’m not convinced that the Kindle is the only platform they could play this role – why not on the Web too?

The Amazing Revival of (Talking About) Paid News

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.