Well, it has taken me a loooong time to follow up the last blog, but please stand by me as I get used to the idea of doing this regularly. In any case, as promised here are a few thoughts regarding the possibility of new revenue models for online magazines, namely pay-per-section/pay-per-column, mixed premium content.
The Problem: For those who need a refresher on why I am questioning the present model to begin with, it is not just about the decreasing revenue and returns of the industry as a whole making this issue evident. No- It is about the convenience that as a consumer of content I would get of making my own premium-content magazine subscription out of only those sections/keywords that I actually care about from existing sources. Don't we do that with CD's now, as in pay-per-track instead of per album? Haven't we been doing this with free content via RSS feeds and Twitter for a long time now? These days online, we simply consume content by unit and pushing the old bundling trick to consumers may be asking too much.
The discussion: I think it is important first and foremost important to make a distinction between free content and premium content. People will always, invariably refuse to pay for what they can already get legally for free somewhere else. Therefore, when I talk about magazine content, I am not talking about those articles that editors already give away for free online.
Many good, smart conversations have spiraled around that type of content towards a dead end. (Thanks to Kevin Li for the tip via
Brazen Careerist BTW) I am talking about the premium content: industry reports, special reports and subscription-only sections that people cannot access for free. I am talking about that 18% of content that people are already paying for online and that would likely be higher if pay-per-section options existed. (See: R. Marya's Mashable post
"65% of Internet Users Paid for Digital Content"). Subscriptions (bundled options) would not need to disappear either. Those will always be attractive to a portion of the population and a smart pricing policy would give bundling discounts to this consumer segment of subscribers, while pay-per-section people (just like pre-paid mobile phone users) would pay a slightly higher price per unit in exchange for their lack of commitment.
The Barriers: People point out to a variety of barriers to this model, mostly around consumer behavior. "Readers do not know what they want to read so you cannot pre-filter news for them" some say. Ask that to StumbleUpon maybe? But without sarcasm, you can actually build a system (much like the paid content of today) where readers get to see a small portion of the article only and choose whether or not they want to see the rest. "Do you want to read it all? No problem, it will only be 25 cents"...or whatever price is right. In my opinion, the biggest hurdle to this model is actually on the supply side. People will want a centralized location to pick sections from different magazines and other publications and pull them all into one personalized queue, much like they get to do on Netflix or iTunes. And, just like iTunes discovered, the biggest challenge to this is getting all the publishers of content to agree on their distribution platform and pricing model.
By the way, has Apple done this yet? Maybe they have and I just don't know about it. I would not put it past them, especially after their incursion into the publishing world with the iPad. Now that I think about it, they may very well be heading the way of the pay-per-section model to un-bundle and disrupt yet another media form. We are just waiting for them to announce it any day soon.
