It’s no longer brave, rash or insightful to suggest printed newspapers will play less of a role in the future. But it counts for something when the scion the world’s largest newspaper company voices the same opinion.

James Murdoch talks about being in “the business of ideas” and says journalism plays a role (phew!) but it won’t be on the scale of News Corp’s broadcasting and entertainment operations.

James Murdoch sees smaller role for newspapers.

Not only did Australia’s two main print news media organisations reject Amazon’s Kindle book reader, both made their rejection public. Fairfax went overboard, publishing versions of the story in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and on its youth-focused site, The Vine. However, it didn’t run in The Australian Financial Review.

News Corporation has been less vocal, although Rupert Murdoch did mention his dissatisfaction with the reader in comments following his company’s annual results.

As this story in The Sydney Morning Herald explains, the problem is Amazon wants to clip the ticket by too much. Some reports suggest the company takes as much as 70 percent of the price of ebook sales and is seeking similar highmargins from newspaper subscriptions.

Sony and Apple are mentioned as possible alternatives. One aspect of this story is the assumption people will want to read online newspapers via a special reader rather than with a PC or smartphone.

Kindle Rejected By Australian Newspapers | Fairfax Media, News Corporation.

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Sport could be the secret weapon in the newspaper industry’s campaign to get general readers to pay for online content.

Like business news, sport is a niche where people have already been trained to expect to pay for specialist coverage.

It has already worked for television. Here in New Zealand there is almost no live sport on free to air television other than international netball. Rugby, cricket, rugby league, soccer, golf and tennis are only shown live on pay TV.

In other words, if Kiwis wants to watch TV sport, they have to pay – and it isn’t cheap.

People seem more willing to pay a premium to watch sport on TV more than other forms of entertainment. That’s partly because of the nature of the beast – a game with an unknown result is exciting. Watching it the next day, or a few hours later, when the score is known just isn’t the same.

Now, newspapers can’t compete directly with TV when it comes to capturing that drama, but I suspect people would still be prepared to pay to have access to first class analysis, high quality games stats and live blog or Twitter style coverage of key matches. An example of how this can work is the way the BBC runs live, online ball-by-ball coverage of cricket test matches. Until it was acquired by ESPN, the Cricnfo site ran similar coverage and managed to sell a number of value-added extras to subscribers.

It wouldn’t be too hard to stick sports journalism behind an online pay wall.

Sports writing operates along slightly different lines to other types of journalism. Sports codes and the big clubs jealously guard access to personalities for interviews, photos and other matters. Publications who don’t, er, play ball, often find themselves on the outer. Some types of coverage are simply not welcomed and sports often exert some forms of control over coverage. It wouldn’t be hard for a sports governing body to license exclusive coverage to one or more newspaper group – clubs could do the same. In fact, News Corporation already has interests in a number of sporting codes and clubs.

Of course, there is one major drawback with this idea. There is evidence that moving sport from free-to-air to pay-TV is damaging some games at a grass roots level – sticking online media coverage behind a paywall may only make matters worse. But that’s another issue…

The signals coming from Fairfax may be slightly jumbled, but the message is clear. Australia and New Zealand’s largest publisher plans to follow Murdoch and charge for online news.

I describe the signals as confused because on Friday, Stephen Hutcheon at the Sydney Morning Herald wrote a story about readers’ reluctance to pay for online news. On one level Hutcheon’s Not happy, Rupert: readers say they won’t pay for online news was a simple dig at the rival News Corporation – complete with an unflattering photograph of Rupert Murdoch. He says News’ announcement was followed by 140 reader comments – mainly from angry readers threatening to go elsewhere the moment charges are applied.

Clearly Fairfax’s left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing because Sunday saw Tom Hyland write Fairfax, News to charge for online at The Age website. He also wrote the longer Stop the presses. Hyland had the unenviable job of quoting Fairfax chief executive Brian McCarthy who told him; “charging for online access was essential if publishers were to maintain their newsroom staff.”

You always know things are going to get tricky when a newspaper executive uses a word like ‘monetising’ and Hyland quotes McCarthy getting his teeth around that in the very next paragraph. He went on to talk about a two-level model at the The Age and the The Sydney Morning Herald websites.

Of course Fairfax is no stranger to charging for online content. The company’s The Australian Financial Review has long been one of the regions few major titles to eschew the free online model and charge readers. By all accounts the AFR’s paywall hasn’t been very successful, but it will have taught the company some useful lessons about how to turn reader clicks into real money.

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Image by Rowen Atkinson via Flickr

Practical subscription models are possible. Micro-payments need a lot more work and may never be a serious option.

Many traditional newspaper publishers plan to charge for online news and other material. Or maybe it would be more correct to say they hope to charge.

Currently online publishers mainly earn money from advertising. They say, with some justification, this doesn’t generate enough revenue to pay for the teams of journalists and editors who produce online newspapers and magazines. It certainly doesn’t deliver the ‘rivers of gold’ profits they enjoyed back in the heyday of newspaper publishing.

But publishers wishing to switch from an advertising revenue model to a charging model or a mixture of advertising and pay-to-read face an up-hill struggle.

For a start, only a small percentage of existing readers are willing to pay any money. Judging by what I’ve heard from people  in the industry, publishers believe somewhere between one and 10 percent of existing readers would be willing to hand over money.

The precise number depends on many factors including the value of the material being offered. But most publishers who’ve tried this in the past have only managed to sell paid subscriptions to one or two percent of online readers.

How much does a single page cost?

Let’s for arguments sake here agree that 10 percent of an online publication’s existing readers would be prepared to pay for content. Remember this number is higher than anyone appears to achieved to date.

This means in order for the paywall to generate as much money as the current advertising model each paying reader will have to contribute as much revenue as ten existing readers.

Online advertising is generally charged by the CPM (cost per thousand). Typically publishers can earn somewhere in the region of $50 for every thousand page views (I’m using indicative numbers and not precise numbers). This is 5 cents per page view. Then to make the same money a single online page would cost 50 cents to read.

If publishers can only convert 2 percent of existing free readers into paying readers the single page price would rise to $2.50 – which is close to the A$3.50 The Australian Financial Review charges for each story.

Charging by the page for online newspapers

While billing users by the page to view online content may look attractive to publishers, it’s not a cost free transaction. The price of delivering a single web page to a browser is so small it is in effect negligible. The cost of adding a per page billing system to a site with ecommerce gateways, security and the paywall technology is slightly higher – though still small compared with the $2.50 fee calculated above.

However, that fee would only replace online advertising revenue. As Rupert Murdoch says, the existing revenue isn’t enough to pay the bills, let alone make a profit. On this basis the cost charged per page would need to rise to at least $3.00, but let’s say for the sake of argument Murdoch needs to make $3.50 per sold online page to cover costs and keep his shareholders happy.

The micro-payment price is just plain wrong

There’s something very wrong with charging readers US$3.50 to read a single online story, or for that matter the A$3.50 charged by the Australian Financial Review. It only costs $3.00 to by a print edition of the newspaper, containing somewhere in the region of 64 tabloid pages. The physical newpaper has been written and edited by a large team, printed on dead trees, wrapped up and distributed across an entire continent to arrive at a local newsagent, who takes a 30 percent or so slice of the cover price. It has at least 100 stories – usually plenty of really good reading – and vast amounts of valuable information. All for 50 cents less than the cost of a single online page that cost the AFR’s publisher nothing to deliver to your screen.

Not only that, but the printed paper is your property for as long as you want. It’s hard saving or downloading the AFR’s online content – though you can print it out at your own cost – probably another 10 cents or so on top of the $3.50 you’ve already paid.

Similar logic applies to any other newspaper sold piecemeal online – it’s not really a sensible purchase. There are times when it makes sense to pay for the occasional story, but over the long haul it is much cheaper to buy the print edition. In fact a subscription to the print edition is 20 percent cheaper than buying the paper each day directly from a newsagent, which makes purchasing stories online relatively more expensive.

What about digital subscriptions?

If buying online stories piecemeal doesn’t make sense, what about digital subscriptions? The model closest to home for me is The Australian Financial Review which charges A$75 a month for access to the digital edition only – that’s the same price as a subscription to the print edition. Which from a reader point of view makes far more sense, but doesn’t pass on any of the savings involved in not printing or distributing the physical paper. Given the costs involved, the margins on this would be huge – which may cause resentment from readers, though probably not the well-heeled types who buy the AFR. But it’s important to recognise the Financial Review covers a specialist niche and its readers can afford to pay a premium online – though by all accounts not many do. It would be much harder for a general newspaper to charge this kind of price.

It’s pretty clear after looking at the numbers that publishers are going to follow the subscription model for online content sales and not micro-payments and selling stories one-by-one. Maybe it’ll work for Murdoch, after all, this is the man who convinced half the western world to pay for television – something that had previously been free. Yet there are other complications. As The Sydney Morning Herald points out Murdoch’s claims that readers would be willing to pay for ‘quality journalism’ is, well, something of a talking point.

Also, there are are major privacy concerns about Murdoch’s plans. As Wendy Davis explains at MediaPost, Murdoch wants to collect reader data – that’s not a move to endear yourself to customers when you’re about to hit them up with new charges.

As I’ve said before, as a journalist and editor, I’ve a vested interest in publishers finding ways to make readers pay for editorial. Unlike many I’m not in principle against the idea, I’m just don’t think it can work without major disruption and top-to-bottom reform of the entire publishing industry. Only a fool would dismiss Murdoch, he knows the media business inside out, but this could yet turn out to be News Corporation’s Vietnam.  We’ll know soon enough.

Dan Conover at Xark has written a great piece arguing against the newspaper publishers’ campaign to charge readers for on-line news.

Conover describes the move as a suicide pact. While describing the idea that readers should pay for the professionally created content they consume as reasonable, he says attempts to force them to pay are “post-rational”.

He points out some of the main flaws, including the fact that consumers don’t want to pay for news and that previous attempts to make them pay have failed. But Conver points out newspaper publishers are no longer listening to reason and are determined to plough ahead with paid content.

Speaking as someone who has spent more than 30 years working as a journalist – most of that time on newspapers – I’d love to see publishers find a way to make on-line news profitable.  But it’s a fantasy.

If Fairfax can only convince a handful of Australian business people to stump up cash to read the highly-targeted and immensely useful Australian Financial Review on-line, what chance to other newspaper publishers have?

You need nerves of steel to bet against Rupert Murdoch, but this time, he and the other newspaper owners are going in the wrong direction – readers are not going to pay to read news. And they definitely will not do so while there are free alternatives.

Xark!: The newspaper suicide pact.

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There’s a major debate in publishing circles about whether consumers can be made to pay for online content. Rupert Murdoch recently moved from the free content camp to thinking out loud about charging readers micropayments to view news content (see Will readers pay for Murdoch’s web content?)

Now Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has announced it will be pressing ahead with a micropayment scheme in addition to more conventional subscriptions.

Reuters columnist Eric Auchard looked at some possible newspaper business models for The Guardian in Pay a small toll to read this news story.  He concludes; “the newspaper industry must find a way to make work one or several of these proposals to make consumers pay for online news. The alternative is to accept that newspapers have had their day.”

Why micropayments?

In theory the subscription model should be a perfect way for delivering digital content. In practice only a handful of businesses have managed to succeed in persuading consumers to pay an upfront fee for pure online content – the best known examples are the adult sites.

There have been famous failures to attract subscription revenue. Slate magazine started out free, then attempted to move to the subscription model. Less than five percent of readers were willing to pay even a modest fee to read the magazine. It has since returned to the ad supported free online newspaper business model. This five percent figure crops up a lot in the context of online subscriptions, but few publishers have ever reached such giddy heights.

Buy print subscription, get digital free

There are some interesting variations on the subscription theme, for example The Economist a British weekly newspaper-magazine has an excellent web site. Initially only subscribers to the print edition had full access to the entire site. Today, The Economist also offers a digital only subscription, it’s about 20 percent of the price of a print subscription. The New Scientist has similar offers.

Another variation is where Internet users can trade their personal information for a subscription. The New York Times allows access to a basic set of pages, but for full access you have to fill out a questionnaire. Fairfax Media’s Stuff site in New Zealand allows registered users to customise pages and news feeds. Fairfax’s Australian sites let registered users take part in competitions and receive custom alerts. In some cases the data from these schemes is used for simple information gathering, in other cases once you’ve signed up you’ll see a never-ending stream of spam.

One reason why many content publishers haven’t yet managed to sell subscriptions is that online payment is still based on credit cards. Although many companies have attempted to introduce micropayment systems, none have taken off. Credit card transactions are simply not economically viable below, say, $10.

Rocky road to micropayments

Although as a journalist and ex-publisher I’d love to find ways of turning my skills into a reliable income once more, I see three big problems with getting readers to pay for online content.

First, for readers to pay money, content has to be valuable and consistently good. The Economist and the New Scientist offer consistently good reading and are reliable, credible information sources.

The same cannot be said for all newspapers. The most popular news stories online tend to be trashy tabloid pieces about celebrities – often hinting at sex or with vaguely sexy pictures. These drag in the punters for online advertising, but few people would pay money for this material.

Second, micropayment schemes would send price signals to journalists. While an economist would argue this is a good thing, it may kill the news business. Newspapers earn their credibility with their markets by the breadth, depth and independence of their coverage. If the easy micropayment dollars all accrue to the trash stories, then quality journalism will be quickly eliminated or relegated to backwaters.

Micropayments will provide newspaper managers with instant financial feedback on the profitability of stories, genres, beats and individual journalists. Journalist will quickly learn to write for salability. Tech Dirt has an interesting perspective on this in Wait… Wouldn’t Micropayments Be Bad For Journalism?

Third, readers may need to set up multiple accounts with multiple publishers. It may be helpful if there was an iTunes style clearing house for online news, but I can’t see a realistic way this could be made to work.

Lastly, the whole idea of charging readers to access news adds considerable friction to the process. Stories behind pay content walls become invisible to search engines. The mere process of a reader stopping and thinking ‘do I have enough credit?’ or ‘is this worth paying for?’ will erode numbers. Regardless of their willingness to pay, the frictionless, free content sites will win the traffic everyday.

What do you think?

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Today The Australian’s Media section ran Readers not averse to paying for online content by Nick Tabakoff. As the headline suggests the story looks at an international study by PricewaterhouseCoopers which found ‘readers could be willing to pay almost as much for some high-quality online newspapers as they do for print versions, particularly in specialist news areas’.

Could this be related to the PricewaterhouseCoopers study referred to by Miriam Steffens in The Sydney Morning Herald’s Readers reluctant to pay for online news?

Indeed it is.

Now, strictly speaking there’s a fairly thin semantic line between ‘readers being reluctant to pay’ and ‘readers not adverse to paying for’. One does not directly contradict the other. But the two headlines are clearly two different interpretations of the same data.

Or as we say in the media, they each have a different spin.

Which one is more plausible?

Both Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the owner of The Australian and Fairfax Media, owner of the SMH have a vested interest in the story.

Murdoch has gone on the record in recent days saying he wants to charge readers for online content on News Corporation web sites. The headline on Nick Tabakoff’s story squares nicely with Murdoch’s recent statements on the issue. We all know Murdoch interferes editorially in his papers. While it’s extremely unlikely he had a hand in this particularly story, it does reflect the official line now coming from News Corporation.

Fairfax is more complicated. The company’s The Australian Financial Review operates behind a content pay wall. It costs around $3 a pop to view an AFR story, though most paying customers have all-you-can-eat subscriptions. On the other hand the SMH, The Age and the company’s other online properties including New Zealand’s stuff.co.nz are all free to readers and make money from online advertising.

Now which story looks the most plausible?

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