Apr02
I’ll go out on a limb and say it flat out: paywalls are a clear sign that the news publisher doesn’t yet understand digital news revenue and where the industry needs to turn for online profits. And no, “online profits” is not an oxymoron (see my previous posts about John Paton and what you can do to drive plenty of online revenue). Yes, banner network advertising pays out next to nothing. Dumping cheap banner ads is the first thing a publisher should do. But going to paywalls is a mistake. Publishers have rarely derived significant revenue from news consumers; most revenue has been from advertising, and will continue to be. And there is plenty of money to be made in digital advertising, if you are willing to look at how businesses are spending their (growing!) advertising budgets. Let’s think about the paywall model a bit. Pundits (and desperate publishers) like to cite The Wall Street Journal as an example of a paywall that works. Well, unless you are publishing a financial journal, forget about the comparison. Subscribers themselves rarely foot the bill for their WSJ subscriptions: the subscription fees are subsidized. How? Because you can take WSJ as a...
Mar28
It breaks my heart when I read articles like a recent one by Michael Wolff of The Guardian describing the news industry’s “imploding business model” and “portending, once again, the end of the world as we know it.” (http://bit.ly/HiLIk3) His article describes why the growing trend toward mobile news is going to kill the news industry, because it will further erode revenue from CPM (impression-based) banner advertising. As if banner ads were a viable model for news regardless. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised by the report; last month John Paton (CEO of Digital First Media, the second-largest media company in the US) said “And for God’s sake stop listening to newspaper people. We have had since the mid-90s to get this right and clearly we are no good at it. Put the digital people in charge – of everything. They can take what we have built and make it better. It is so very important we get this right – not just for the industry and investors – but for our communities.” (http://jxpaton.wordpress.com/) As one of those “digital people” I’ve been working to transform the news industry by introducing digital media innovation, both on the newsroom and the sales revenue side....
Mar22
I recently spoke to several publishers at Publishing Expo in London about their content management systems, and a few gave me the usual sad story about trying to build a newsroom in-house. This is more than a “build vs. buy” issue, especially for newsrooms where the CMS is critical to the entire business operation. Failure in the newsroom is not only expensive, it can spell disaster for the company as a whole. IT project failure rates are the stuff of legend. The Standish Group, a Boston-based IT consulting firm, is famous for its annual CHAOS Report, documenting IT project failure rates (which hover around a shocking 30% success rate, with over 2/3 of the projects “Failed” or “Challenged” according to the report criteria. Statistics like these are well known to the IT and bespoke development community in the corporate IT world. But lessons from corporate IT don’t seem to have trickled into the publishing world, so let me offer a few insights into project failure and why you don’t want to build your own newsroom. First, newsroom systems are complex pieces of software; they are not simple document management systems of the kind a clever IT organization could reasonably...
