By Linda Forrest
There’s a war going on on the internet. A war between traditional content providers and consumers. Ironic, given that the battle is over a communication channel, that what we have here is a failure to communicate.
It’s been impossible for me to avoid information lately about paid content on the internet, subscription models for newspapers online, and Rupert Murdoch’s gaffes when it comes to information distribution in a connected world.
It all started with an article in a recent Vanity Fair about Murdoch’s determined stance on making readers pay for online content. The fact that he told an interviewer last week that he plans to drive readers to the paid content by blocking Google from indexing his newspapers, a move that renders their content invisible to the world at large, shows that, as Michael Woolf posits, perhaps he just doesn’t understand what’s at stake here and just how pervasive Google is.
As Valleywag suggested, perhaps Murdoch should read a recent report from Forrester that says that 80% of the 4,000 consumers polled will not pay for online newspaper content and that the remainder are divided on the payment model they’d agree to (subscription versus paying for individual articles).
The real trouble starts when you factor in that 60% of newspaper executives are working on paid-content models. Yikes.
Today’s media world is transparent for those who wish to see, Have a question for your marketplace? Then pose it in any of the many channels available to you. You’ll quickly learn what your customers want and what they don’t want. The fact that those in control of the traditional media aren’t even trying to really understand the tools available to them and devising new revenue models around this new reality is just pathetic. Perhaps the traditional media deserves to dwindle to the point of irrelevance if it’s so unaware of its environment.
The idea of including marketing in an agile product development strategy, as @FrancisMoran wrote about earlier this week, isn’t all that far removed from what newspaper execs need to do here. Listen to your market as you’re deciding what to do and involve them in the process. Rather than engineer newspaper content delivery to suit your revenue desires, find out how your readers want to access your content and build a revenue strategy around that. Seems obvious…
