Sometime in the next month or so, between five and 15 online publishers will start testing Journalism Online's system for paid content. Around year's end, they'll start charging users to access some content on their sites. But the vast majority of users will not notice anything, said Steven Brill.
Most people talk about paid content as "pay walls." Brill, co-founder of Journalism Online, likens it to a gradually deepening pool.
"Imagine a fancy swimming pool at a resort," Brill explained by phone Thursday, "where you can walk into the water 20 or 30 steps before you're really in the water, instead of having to dive into the deep end where you're worried about how cold it is."
That's the basis of
Journalism Online's pay model: If publishers are worried that charging for content will cause a huge drop in page views (and thus advertising revenue), they can dip their toes in by choosing settings that affect a minimal amount of content or just the most frequent users. Publishers can decide if they want to swim to the deep end as they see how users respond.
Even the most intense users, those who visit a site several times a day for instance, will not suddenly learn that their favorite site has blocked off content. "There's going to be nothing for customers that's going to be sudden about this," Brill said.
Brill used
the Financial Times Web site to explain how users would discover what's free and what's not on the sites of 1,200 Journalism Online affiliates. Anyone can visit ft.com and view two articles a month. When a user clicks on the third, the screen darkens and this notice pops up:
The next screen outlines the limits of free registration and the privileges of a paid subscription:
Users who decide to register can view 10 articles a month. After that, the screen darkens again and this message appears:
The few beta testers of Journalism Online include sites affiliated with newspapers and magazines (some in the U.S., some abroad), blogs and online-only news operations. Brill's company will not announce who the beta testers are, though he expects the publishers to do so themselves before anyone starts paying.
"All the sites are going to be offering some combination of free and paid," Brill said. "We have talked some of our affiliates out of dropping a wall" and charging for all content. "None will drop a wall all at one moment. Most will not drop a wall."
What content will publishers charge for, and how much will they charge? That's up to them. The company's "
Reader Revenue Platform" [PDF] describes several different ways to monetize content:
- High Activity Pay Points: Users can view a certain number of articles within a particular time period.
- Selected Content Pay Points: Some content is free, other content is paid.
- Time-Based Pay Points: For a particular time period after content is published, it's available for a fee; later, it's free. (This method sounds like a consumer version of the Associated Press' proposal to charge search engines a premium for the most immediate news, which my colleague Bill Mitchell wrote about.)
- Enhanced Service Pay Points: Users pay for more frequent updates, access to commenting systems, tools to share content or other services.
- Market Access Pay Points: Users pay based on where they are. International users may pay because their traffic doesn't help sell advertising, for instance.
- Preview Activity Pay Points: A certain amount of an article is available for free; an additional amount costs.
At any time, publishers will be able to adjust any of these variables -- for instance, how much of an article can be previewed for free or how much time must elapse before content is available at no cost. A publisher may set the number of free articles per month at 25 and then lower it to find out when page views drop such that it jeopardizes advertising dollars.
As far as how readers would pay, Journalism Online will offer several options:
- Single-article micropayments
- Multiple-article or time-based micro-subscriptions
- Weekly, monthly or annual subscriptions
- Bulk subscriptions across multiple publications
- Print/online subscription bundles
Publishers will be able to choose any combination of these. They could even mix which payment options are available for different types of content restrictions; perhaps enhanced services would require a subscription, but articles could be purchased individually.
A lot of flexibility is being built into this system. Users could convert micropayments into subscriptions. If they buy an article and decide it's not what they want, they can "return" it within the first few minutes. (I've often hesitated to buy an archived article because I couldn't tell from the abstract if I was wasting my $3.95.)
And Journalism Online's pay structure could be used for donations not related to specific content and for memberships with special privileges, which
could be used for nonprofit news organizations.
No one, Brill said, knows which of these payment options will work and in what situations. For instance, he doesn't believe micropayments will take off -- but he's willing to try it.
"I guarantee that in six or nine months," he said, "we can look at these 16 [ways of monetizing content] and we can declare together that five of them were totally stupid, ridiculous, and why were we screwing with them?"
The company will track metrics and build a knowledge base about what works and in what situations. Publishers will be able to see what works elsewhere to help them structure their approach.
Such research is a key part of Journalism Online's strategy, Brill said. One piece of good news their research has uncovered: For newspaper Web sites, and even more for magazine sites, frequent users appear to make up a larger share of readers than thought. Rather than being 10 to 20 percent, it's more like a third to 40 percent. Since this frequent user base is most likely to be the one paying for content, the greater proportion is significant.
And in the long term, Brill said, "in two or five or 10 years, when the predominant way you'll be publishing is online and not by chopping down trees and paying truck drivers, [customers] need to have gotten used to the fact that there's value online and I'm paying for it."
For those sites that offer content you can't get anywhere...
