There was a good ‘debate’ at the McKinsey debate zone on whether people will pay for content, in the context of newspapers. An old debate by now, and one whose conclusion is being seen around, with very few exceptions (the reasons for the relative success of the Big 3 of fee-for-content services—the FT, the Economist, and the WSJ are also dealt with), but made interesting because of its succinctness. Clay Shirky writes about the ‘high price of charging for content’, and starts with a very interesting line – “People will pay for content if it is necessary, irreplaceable, and unshareable.”
[Before we go further, I have to share this amazing read (or listen) with you – Clay Shirky, at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. (also read the first 3 links to the commentaries on the web, the fourth is a twitter feed)]
I’ll attempt a summary because the context is needed for the post. He talks about the temporary arrangement that had allowed accountable journalism to create an advertising based business model, and how in the internet era, specialist information sources have disrupted that model and allowed advertisers many more, and better options. He talks about how the newspapers’ way of bundling content, where readers and advertisers subsidised the content they didn’t want, doesn’t work now, and the aggregation has now moved from the ‘server-side’ to the ‘client-side’. He sees “the newspapers’ ability to produce accountability journalism shrinking”, and is convinced that “those changes are secular, monotonic, and irreversible, rather than being merely cyclic and waiting for the next go around.” He also points out a major and adverse side effect of this disruption – the absence of newspapers as a bulwark against civic corruption. (While there are other media and their ‘sting ops’, I’d still say that the role of newspapers in this regard is still important). This is something I remember debating a few months back over at Iq’s blog, when he wrote on this issue.
He believes that newspapers are irreplaceable in accountability journalism, and sees three kinds of experiments happening in the new media landscape – market based (commercial, the traditional advertising model of publishers), public (funded by income other than revenue – like non-profit models) and social (crowdsourced models). The internet makes the first difficult to sustain, the second easier, and the third, easiest.
In a recent post, Umair Haque writes about the open ‘mediaconomy’, which offers tons of soda, but good wine too, and that’s the reason why most old media companies are in trouble now – ‘they’ve been for long producing generic soda, instead of distinctive kinds of wine.’ And in an economy where supply of soda far exceeds demand, how long will people continue to pay for it? As Umair points out, its not just about media, but any industry that’s doing the same.
Now, a few days back, when I was searching for some information for a holiday, I went to my list of regular suspects – a few Indian hotel/destination review portals and a few travel portals. I did find information, but was given a choice of hotels that I wasnt too happy with. I had opened another tab for the traveler advice on WikiTravel, and happened to come across options in the ‘Stay’ section which I hadn’t seen anywhere else. In fact it gave me more options than I’d have liked and I was forced to choose from two equally good places, whose websites had all the information I wanted.
WikiTravel is free, created and curated by users, who take the time out to update and add information. They will obviously incur costs when doing this, and spend some time. They obviously are supported by a revenue model (personal) that allows this, a revenue model that most likely is part of the old economy (commercial, unlike public or social) And that’s what makes me worried about the transition period, the part when the old economy is too weak to support the new, and the new doesn’t have a way to support itself.
The other point is that the content is out there, but the soda and wine are all mixed, and I’m yet to figure a model where I’m sure I’m not missing something. Yes, there is Reader, Twitter and perhaps a couple of other places, but these do have a tendency to evolve into an echo chamber every now and then. Serendipity does lose out a lot when I put systems and processes in place. Newspapers were aggregators in their time. I can customise tools to give me the news on only those categories I’m interested in. (Rarely) Sometimes people add the serendipity. In many cases, when I’m searching for specific information, the tools (search) and the humans (crowdsourcing) have failed me. I have ended up ‘discovering’ new resources – sites/tools/people and then sharing it. Its not as organised a way as I’d like, but I guess we’re still evolving.
There is quite some work happening though. Google Reader recently added some ‘Magic’ which helps users discover interesting content faster. The new ‘Explore’ section has a generic popular items as well as recommended sources suggested basis the reader trends and web history (if opted in). Feeds can also now be sorted by ‘magic’, again basis the history of ‘like’ and ‘share’. Twitter lists will add a new dimension to discovering users and content, and with the deals with Bing and Google, search is going to be more real time, and more importantly, involve a human filter – using the lists layer to deliver better, more relevant search results. The impact on SEO should be fun. TweetMixx is a site I came upon recently, and looks interesting in this context.
Where will it land up? Is it possible to create an aggregator whose context is subjective preferences, but that will still bring in serendipity? (people who liked this also liked?) What kind of content aggregator will evolve that can either sustain itself without revenue, or convince me to pay for it? Or perhaps that single-entity era is over. It does make me wonder if at some point in time, everyone will be Hiro Protagonist like characters, paid for each piece of information they add into the overall system. 🙂
until next time, infobesity
Bonus Read: A very good read on ‘Why the great Indian media companies will fail on the internet‘
Update: Set up Parse.ly Lets see what it delivers. 🙂