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.
It’s refreshing to see a newspaper looking for online subscription revenue approach the problem creatively. Rather than building a “pay wall” around the news they’re already giving away, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has just this month launched PG+, a premium tier with exclusive blogs, videos and sports coverage, as well as lots of members-only contests and deals with local merchants and advertisers. It costs $3.99 a month, or less if you buy a full year at a time. (They’ve also built a very effective online tour and sales pitch for the product.)
So far, it seems to be football that’s driving the “most read” stories list on PG+, not too surprising in Pittsburgh in September. And one could make some other quibbles: Why doesn’t the site have its own URL? But this is a great experiment to watch. If publishers want to grow their online reader revenue, it’s new products, not carving up old ones, that are going to provide the real wins.
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.
An interesting column by Simon Dumenco at AdAge.com called “How the $0 Netbook Might Just Help Save the Media Industry.” The thesis: To make money on low-margin netbooks, computer makers might have to gin up some bundles of add-on content to sell — perhaps including news and media subscriptions. In the process, they’d help jump-start the idea that said content is actually worth paying for.
I’m a little skeptical about the hardware people getting into this successfully, but it’s a reminder that there are plenty of people who might want to build packages of content, either to sell or to use as incentives for their own marketing. There are always combatants desperately trying to gain market share (Comcast vs. FiOS, Verizon vs. Sprint, Lexis vs. Westlaw, Starbucks vs. McDonald’s) — they need some of the proverbial (and elusive) “added value” to get people to switch. Why shouldn’t premium content (music, news, video) be part of the bait? Would you try using Google Chrome, or use a Verizon wireless data plan instead of Sprint’s, if you got access to premium news and music you’d otherwise have to pay for? If the offer were compelling enough, you might.
This isn’t a new idea. Why, back in 1996 when I worked at wsj.com, we got a big check from Microsoft to give Internet Explorer 3 users free access to the otherwise subscription-only Wall Street Journal (they also got some nice things from ESPN and MTV). Back then, Microsoft was trying to grab share from the then-dominant browser, Netscape. They did. This year (when they can force you to download IE8 in a way they couldn’t in 1996) Microsoft is giving the money to charity instead. The newspapers might need it more – too bad so few of them have come up with interesting services worth charging for.
When it comes to the nuts and bolts of selling online subscriptions, who knows more than Marketing Sherpa founder Anne Holland? Here’s Anne’s newest site, www.whichtestwon.com, with some fun quizzes where you can guess which online offer pulled the highest response. Good luck, Anne!
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.
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.)
Once again there’s active talk about some new plans to charge for NYTimes.com: one model where only heavier users of the site pay for the privilege (as in FT.com’s system), and what is described as a “membership model,” where you’re paying for, well, various as-yet-undefined benefits of being a Times “member,” not just for news.
I am someone who has long thought it’s a little crazy for a fabulous brand like the Times not invent something they can charge for online. But plenty of observers still regard every sign that a newspaper is going to charge for content as a pathetic move that’ll never work. In some cases, that’s clearly true. But there’s an actual chance of success if publications approach the question, not as “How do I start charging for what we’re doing online?”, but instead “What do I have the skills and relationships to put together that is worth money to people?” Deliver enough utility, exclusivity or entertainment, and you’re crazy not to charge for it.
Even this idea of a “membership” isn’t as lame as it sounds. Why not try to build multiple benefits into an annual fee? Yes, there have been plenty of “affinity” programs — even the Times had some useless subscriber “benefit” card a few years ago. But these programs need to go beyond the usual 10%-off-your-second-entree-before-6PM discounts people will never use. Why can’t a local publication put together a package of genuinely valuable privileges — local music, wine tastings, networking, food events, mobile alerts, guides, handbooks — one that would make buying an annual “membership” a no-brainer? Surely there are enough advertisers everywhere right now who are desperate enough for qualified leads that they’d get on board with something innovative.
Putting a subscription wall up in front of a not-very-useful product won’t work. Designing some kind of a package of information and other benefits that delivers enough value that you’d leave it on your credit card, year after year — well, publishers are dumb not to invest in figuring out what that might be.
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?
