Andrew Trench notes from the revolution

Why the paid content sceptics are wrong

I find the overwhelming scepticism among thought leaders in our industry over the willingness of readers to pay for

All news must be free? Picture used under Wikipedia Creative Commons license

online news to be quite overwhelming. I must admit to some serous irritation when I read this blog post yesterday morning over at Editors Weblog about a survey that examined whether Australians would cough up for news online. There is an almost crowing tone in the post at the finding that just over 70% of respondents said they would not pay.

Well, the other side of the coin is, of course, that about 30% of respondents said they would pay for news.

From where I’m sitting that seems like a mighty fine number – 3/10 saying they would spent a pretty penny to be informed. Most online pundits seem to regard the idea of charging for content which has, until now, been free as some sort of sacrilege. But why should this be so? We charge R4.50 for a copy of the Daily Dispatch and more than 30 000 people in our community pay for it, seem to enjoy the paper and don’t begrudge the cost. Most of that content goes up on our website early each morning where another 100-120 000 people a month make use of it – and don’t pay a cent.

Of course this wouldn’t be a problem if hundreds of thousands of rand in advertising revenue was pouring into our business thanks to our website, but that’s not happening.

So, why should we continue to give away this information for which others happily pay? An enormous amount of effort goes into producing this content – a rough calculation would put it at about 400 person-hours a day. That’s not something you give away for free.

Critics would say that charging for content is suicide; that we would simply see most of our online audience disappear. They’re probably right, but does it matter?

As an editor I love having as many readers as we can lay our hands on but even in print we essentially choose who we want to be our reader. We position our paper to speak to a certain demographic profile and pursue those readers with passion. If, as the Australian study suggests, 30 percent of online readers would pay for news, that would give us around 30 000 new. paying readers every month. These would be readers who are willing to make an investment in our brand and our content. I have to ask myself: what should we be going for? A hundred thousand free readers or 30 000 paying ones? I’m not Rupert Murdock, but the answer seems pretty obvious.

I’d be happy to have even 10 000 readers paying to read the Dispatch Online every month. It would provide us with a healthy revenue stream, easily cover the costs our little web team – and allow us to invest even more in quality online and print journalism.

To continue to give away content for free will not improve journalism, it will kill it. Or we can sit around waiting for a goose to lay a golden egg.

But, the critics will argue, I haven’t taken into account the “lie factor”. How many of these readers in the Australian study would actually cough up when it came to the crunch?

This is something else I have noticed about opinions on these paid-for-content surveys. The overwhelming view is that the respondents are lying and that they will not pay when it comes down to it. Why are these surveys treated with such suspicion? We treat opinion polling prior to an election with great respect. We commission, for example, market research on our print products and take the results seriously.

I don’t look at market research that tells me my readers want more soccer coverage or more stories of hope in the paper and think they are lying. I think they are being honest and I try and implement what our market research tells us our readers want.

If market research into Dispatch online readers suggested that a significant percentage would be prepared to pay for our content, I would believe this to be the case. In fact, we have done research in this regard and the results were pretty surprising. I won’t go into the details of it, but will say that the findings suggested that there was a potential paying audience for our content.

Scores of more substantial studies have been done which attempt to answer this question and they all come up with varying answers – as this interesting piece by Paidcontent.co.uk highlighted. But what is significant about all these studies is that they all show that there are online users out there who will pay. But, they are only a minority, the critics carp. So, what wrong with that, and how is that different to the world of print?

For example, the Daily Dispatch sells just north of 30 000 copies of the paper a day. Those are our paying readers, but AMPS gives us an audience of a whisker under 300 000 readers daily. So, in our print publication about 10% of our readers physically pay for the content.

Have a look at the chart produced by Paidcontent.co.uk (below) which shows the percentage of readers willing to pay for online content from the various leading studies that have been done. If you average out the percentages of respondents who say they would pay and you come to a bit over 20% - well, that's even better than what happens in my real world newspaper experience. [post continues below graphic]

Could this suggest that there is a correlation between the percentage of readers willing to pay for online content and the percentage of readers willing to pay for content in the form of a physical newspaper? I’m not sure and my example is obviously simplistic but perhaps this is something worth thinking about.

Maybe my assumptions are flawed, but the plethora of studies into whether online users would pay for content seems to suggest that this is a viable path for publishers.

I think what will be significant will be the nature of the content people are being asked to pay for. The Wall Street Journal and the FT have shown that financial news online will find paying subscribers. One of my favourite magazines is Fortune and I wouldn’t think twice about paying to access its great analysis and engaging writing online if, for some reason, I could not get a physical copy of it.

But what about newpapers like the one I edit?

The Daily Dispatch is not the WSJ or the FT. It’s a regional newspaper covering the Eastern Cape. It is deeply connected to the broader community it covers and we produce news from an area which is pretty much untouched by other publications or journalists. We have a fiercely loyal readership in both print and in online.  I’d like to think they see value in our content and that perhaps a small percentage would be willing to pay for it online.

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