Publishers may be examining how to charge for online news, but the free ride is far from over. Most everyday web users have enjoyed 15 years of free news, sport and entertainment content – and that won’t change overnight. Any site offering the same mass-market content found elsewhere should beware of raising the paywall – readers are more likely to decamp to an alternative news source than to whip out their credit card.
Sites hoping to start charging must consider whether they can offer must-read information and services that rivals are not. Any shift to paying for content by papers and magazines is also likely to be piecemeal, rather than absolute. (The Times already charges crossword buffs £24.99 for a year’s subscription to its puzzles; weather forecasts wouldn’t fare so well).
In the online world – fuelled by a decade-long advertising boom that has made not just content free but whole suites of tools and services – there is the aphorism “information wants to be free”. By choosing not to charge readers when they first got online, news publishers let the free genie out of the bottle – and it can’t easily be put back.
When the New York Times placed its venerable comment pieces behind a paywall in 2005, the few paying readers liberated them by copying them to public blogs; when other sites demanded users register before reading, BugMeNot.com harvested logins for refuseniks to use instead. According to a KPMG survey last month, 60% of users would rather watch an ad than pay to consume content – after all, it’s how we’ve watched and listened to commercial TV and radio for years.
The expectation that online content is free is in part because it is intrinsically copyable. Ask the music industry, which tried introducing copy protection to stop CDs being shared online but which has all but abandoned the idea. Now that 95% of all music downloads are unauthorised, record labels are instead giving their tunes to listeners, funded by ads sold by services such as Spotify. In publishing, users are already reading ad-supported stories on Google from wire services such as the Press Association – but newspapers seem keener on fighting the search engine.
All this freeloading does depend on the health of the advertising business – but that’s projected to bounce back late next year. And it’s not that users won’t pay for valued services – there’s hope in music for the all-you-can-eat monthly subscription, dating websites do well and Friends Reunited’s premium users were making ITV money before it switched the site to advertising just in time for the recession. But, as these and many successful business news sites know, any newspaper publishers going down that road will first need to look in the mirror and ask: “Can my readers get content this good anywhere else?”
• The writer is editor of paidContent:UK