In an tweet earlier today I asked: Would you pay $40 per month for your local newspaper… if it included a free iPad? (1 year contract.)
How much would you pay to subscribe to your local newspaper, if the newspaper through in an iPad for free? At $40 per month the 16GB WIFI version would be paid for within a year. The 3G version would cost about $53 for the same 1 year term.
An interesting concept for sure, but would it work? What are the ramifications to consider? Andrew Chavez asks “who pays for the data plan? Good point, if the newspaper paid the data plan they might be able to turn off the 3G signal if the subscriber defaults on payments.
It’s just an idea at this point, curious what other out there might think about the concept.
Can you sell?
Do you have a twitter account? Do you know what GTD means without looking it up? Do you think community newspaper’s glass is half full or half empty?
Come work for an independent media company in Northern California. We are small, agile and independent; which means very little bureaucracy, drama and politics. If you are a “doer” a “less talk , more action” kind of person, I want to talk to you.
The Digital Media division of McNaughton Newspaper Group is looking for the right person to lead our non-traditional revenue initiatives. This includes selling solo, and as a team with existing sales staff. We offer generous compensation and an outstanding work environment.
And you get to work for the best boss in the business 
McNaughton Newspapers is an equal opportunity employer providing a drug free work environment.
That could be a real headline for local newspapers who take their heads out the sand and think about the real financial implications of a paywall strategy.
Looking at the online subscriber report for one of the newspaper websites that I help operate, I see we had 300 new online subscriptions last month. This is at 17K circulation daily newspaper. (1.76% growth per month) Those are no cost subscription starts. Regular crewed start can cost newspapers as much as $35 each. You probably see where I’m going with this…
Here’s the math I use for the headline example:
• 50,000 circulation daily newspaper puts up a paywall on their website, eliminating free access to their content.
• Churn subscriptions are reduced by 880 subscribers per month (1.76%)
• 880 * $35 per start * 12 months = $369,600 anual savings
As Sean Blanda points out in his blog post, community (small) newspapers maybe left out of coming the e-reader (iPad) revolution. I would like to lead a team of news innovators in creating a iPad strategy for community newspapers.
The following is Sean’s “very, very basic outline” I agree on all but the last point, for the foreseeable future I don’t expect newspapers to incur any costs in this endeavor. That’s right free, as in “free beer.” The way I see it getting publishers to ACT is the hard part, followed by coming up with compelling ideas. The technology is really quite trivial nowadays, so by committing the technical resources, I’m getting off easy.
Step One: Publishers band together based on common interest. For example, local Web sites likely have similar interests in the functionality of their iPad and mobile applications.
Step Two: The publishers come to agreement on a list of common feature sets and what they envision an app looking like.
Step Three:
Each publisher contributes a fraction of the total cost to hire a centralized development team (or just one developer) to maintain and focus exclusively on developing platforms with an emphasis on the Apple SDK.
So what are you waiting for, no time to loose right? Please leave a comment here with your intention to participate or email me at jboydston at gmail. Check back here often, I’ll update this page with additional info as we progress.
Traditional wisdom and countless studies show that FREQUENCY is a key measure of advertising effectiveness. Specifically regarding how many times an individual must be shown an advertisement before they are compelled into action. Figures vary widely from 6 to over 30 ad impressions required for maximum efficiency.
A logical conclusion would be that higher frequency will yield higher results. Furthermore, very low frequency (1-5 impressions) will yield very poor results.
Now lets look at some anaylitics from one of our paywalled sites:
definitions:
CTR = click through rate, percentage of users who click on an ad online
PPV = Pages read per visitor (basically, this is frequency)
CTR from subscribers (all pages)
0.51%
CTR from subscribers (paywall only pages)
2.87%
CTR from google (all non-direct traffic)
0.11%
PPV paywall pages
6.5 – 12
PPV google traffic
2.5
This is the logic behind my belief that traffic from google is almost useless to us. If google traffic RARELY exceeds the frequency required for advertising effectiveness, that traffic is truly useless to our advertisers.
Lets say news.com has 200,000 monthly pageviews. We don’t sell online advertising by the number of uniques, so uniques don’t matter in this example. News.com is able to change an aggressive $12 CPM on the impressions, and they run 3 ads per page. (many community papers get 5-7 CPM)
200 * 12 * 3 = $7,200 per month
Pre-print advertisers pay a premium to have their inserts delivered to specific geographic regions, on specific days. In print we call this “zoning.” By adding the paywall we can ZONE online ads and command a premium $25/CPM (or more).
200 * 25 * 3 = 15,000 per month
In order to determine how much traffic you might loose lose, look at the google search terms. Google used to provide 30% of our traffic, which could in theory equal a 30% drop in traffic. (-$4500 per month ouch)
However, when you look at the search terms you see that most of the search traffic is:
newspaper.com
News Paper
Town Newspaper
etc.
Very generic terms, very few searches come from individual stories. In fact the number was 7.1% That’s the google traffic we lost from blocking the google-bot.
Now the upside… Traffic did take a 25% hit, from readers as they learned to use the pay-site and come to terms with paying for access to our community. But over the course of two years users have learned that if they want to know what’s happening in our town, they have to come to our site. Our traffic has actually doubled in two years since blocking google/RSS.
The reason why? Users have to come to our site to find the headlines. They must click on LOCAL NEWS to see the full run down on the goings on around town. And that behavior is PRECISELY why we can charge a premium for local advertising. Our readers want to feel included in the community. They are NOT just reading content. They skim the story list to see what’s going on, to stay connected.
The PAYWALL is not about CONTENT, never was. It’s about access to a community.
Perhaps there is a more strategic reason newspapers have not implemented the Everyblock software yet. What exactly would a newspaper implementation of everyblock look like?
⁃ A stand alone site, that the newspaper links to?
⁃ A separate section of the newspaper site?
⁃ Somehow integrated into the CMS providing context?
⁃ Something else entirely?
In order to answer these questions I think it’s important to define the expected outcome. What would be the expected goal if implementing Everyblock on a new website? Here are my top three:
1. Build online “hyper-local” neighborhood resources – Many newspapers lack a true hyper local aspect to their site. The ambition would be to segment news and information down to the neighborhood or even block level. Something most CMS’s don’t do, or newsroom organizations are not equipped to manage. Everyblock could in theory provide a framework for a newsroom with a narrowly focused workflow.
2. Publish public records – Everyblock includes some powerful data tools. From scraping & parsing data to publishing subsets in logical groups. Many smaller news organizations still collect data the old fashioned way. Individual spreadsheets are not uncommon, but completely unuseful in creating data driven web features. Portions of the Everyblock code could be used by newspapers to collect, store, organize and retrieve public data in a highly structured and consistent manner.
3. Content discovery tool – Everyblock.com in it’s now commercial form allows the user to browse it’s data in an interactive way. This process of discovery by the user is missing from newspaper sites. Everyblock could provide newspapers with an alternative to the traditional list of headlines interface.
How would you like to see everyblock used in a newspaper environment?
The code behind Everyblock.com (as of June 09) was released under an open source license, but as of today I’m not aware of a single website using the technology. Newspaper in particular I would expect to have a keen interest in this software, but so far not a single paper has tried it.
What’s the hold up?
The code has been downloaded 859 times as of this writing.
For those who care enough to download, one read through the documentation is probably enough to scare you off. If you actually try installing the system, all but seasoned LINUX geeks will likely balk or fail completely. (out of date dependancies, etc.)
It’s like baking bread from scratch vs using a boxed recipe. The materials required to cook from scratch cost more, you need to be or employ an experienced cook and it takes far longer. Unless newspaper have a budget for this project of even a fraction of Everyblock’s original 1.1 million they can forget about implementing software like this.
… unless … we we simplify the installation procedures and provide tutorials on best practices and example use cases for under funded newspapers.
Have you installed the Everyblock software? Where did you get stuck? Do you have ideas on what we as the open source community can do to make it more useful to the majority of newspapers out there?
Below are four charts comparing the webstats from two newspapers of similar size. Dailyerpublic.com is our PAID site, thereporter.com is a FREE site from a neighboring town. These stats are all freely available at quantcast.com. The links are repeated at the bottom of the post for easy comparison of the three SOLANO COUNTY news websites.
The FREE site has many more UNIQUES:
http://www.joeboydston.com/paid_unique.html
When we look at PAGEVIEWS the margin narrows:
http://www.joeboydston.com/paid_pageviews.html
The PAID site takes the lead in visits per user:
http://joeboydston.com/paid_visits_per_user.html
And looking at BILLABLE pageviews per person, the PAID site dominates :
http://joeboydston.com/paid_pageviews_per_person.html
UNIQUE USERS
PAGEVIEWS
VISITS PER USER
PAGEVIEWS PER USER
Newspapers should thank Craigslist. Proof positive that FREE is a business model. An affirmation that classifieds are valuable a product, and worth fighting for. We are reminded that innovation is a necessity, not just a concept taught in business schools or Silicon Valley.
Innovation is a a key habit that all media organizations will need to adopt in order to move their profit centers into the digital era. Craigslist is not a technical marvel, it is a social one. Any local media organization can launch a site exceeding Craigslist’s feature set for under $200 by using software like NOAH’S CLASSIFIEDS. So what is stopping us? They even have a hosted product now for publishers with limited technical resources. How can we afford NOT to innovate?
