Paid Content

Just a quick follow-up to my early post about the future of paid content.

Long coming, Hulu Plus is now available for TV-watchers. My guess is we’ll start to see more invasive advertising on regular Hulu now, less choice and more inducements to move to Plus. By the way, Plus, still requires you to watch ads. #FAIL

John Biggs, on Crunch Gear, talks about the pay wall. He highlights the Onion’s Future News TV show – on the iTunes Store – and Popular Mechanics iPad app as examples of content providers moving to the for-pay model.

The key here? Compelling content, expertly produced. Isn’t that what we all want anyway? Without the interruption of invasive advertising?

NewsCorp’s newspaper properties in the UK – The Times and Sunday Times – are switching to a subscription model roughly June 1, 2010. Currently, highlights from both papers are available free with advertising support via NewsCorp’s Times Online.

The Times is a highly-respected paper, perhaps the UK’s most-respected (in terms of its journalistic content, if not its management). Rupert Murdoch – Chairman of NewsCorp – thinks worthy writers should be paid accordingly, and I happen to think he’s right. The question is: Can The Times create a publication that stands apart plainly enough to make it valuable to customers hooked on free news?

I believe we’re entering a new era here. To be worth paying for, The Times – and all others newscrafters that pride themselves on journalistic excellence – are going to have to re-invent what being a newspaper means. They’re going to have to embrace technology, but more importantly they are going to have to end their ugly reliance on advertising support. Face it: newspapers – and their mostly-awful on-line services today – are crafted for advertisers, not for readers. This will be the subject of an upcoming (long!) post, but for the meantime, the news industry needs to return to providing readers quality journalism in a form and format that customers enjoy and derive value from.

If NewsCorp’s new electronic editions are simply identical to the current offering – replete with unreadable layouts, flashing ads, and unblockable full-page ad insertions, but with a login required – I suggest they will fail. The New York Times – America’s most venerable daily publication – failed at this model. A newspaper online needs to be different than a newspaper-in-the-hand and it needs to be crafted – journalistically and structurally – for the reader. Until newspapers recognize that, paid subscriptions will fail.

Let me point, here, point back to my recent post on MasterCard opening its credit card payment system to developers. Perhaps “subscriptions” is also the wrong approach. Perhaps newspapers need to experiment with other models for generating revenue – alternatives to buying the whole enchilada when you only want one article.

Best of luck, Rupert!