Pay Walls May Work…One Day

 

Predictions from futurologists way back in the early nineties about the World Wide Web suggested that the existing printing presses would probably be the last ones that the publishing industry would need to invest in. They rubbed their hands with exhilaration at the prospect of increasing their readership and revenues without having to increase their costs at the margin by printing extra editions in the future.

It seemed obvious. Readers were very much accustomed to going to their local newsagent and handing over cash to buy their daily newspaper. Surely, once the benefits of the Web was explained to these consumers, they would be more than happy to electronically transact to pay for information that would update more frequently and be just as qualitative.

But reality regularly disappoints. This is why many publications now have falling printed circulations and higher online readerships which have failed to generate the same revenue as print.

Since the dot com boom, consumers now expect all information for free. After dot com bust, many publications tried to introduce pay walls (paid subscription content). But they have failed because the barriers to entry have tumbled amid the onslaught of citizen journalists (and a few enterprising professional journalists) setting up their own blogs which they are able to put together for next to nothing.

Some, like this one, have very sophisticated open source content management systems (CMS) that mirror the sophistication of CMSs that often cost large publishing concerns hundreds of thousands of pounds to implement. How can an organisation, that send out dozens to thousands of payslips each month, compete with someone uploading to their blog whose entire infrastructure cost runs to less than a hundred pounds a year? Yes, the barriers to entry in this glamorous business have fallen that far.

The answer may lie in more creative online news pages. When a print publication is put together, an editor commissions (because that’s what he’s specialises in), a journalist writes (because that’s what he specialises in), a sub corrects (you get the picture) and a designer puts the page together - sometimes with the assistance of a picture editor.

In the online world, however, the IT department puts together a rigid template for every story which is left to a journalist to fill with very little leeway to be visually creative. This is why consumers are unwilling to pay for something that has the same design quality as a leaflet advertising a local church bring-and-buy sale. It doesn’t matter about the quality of the writing. Most web readers do not have the time to invest in finding out if something is worth reading if it doesn’t look like it’s worth reading.

It’s not just the editor and writer who are journalists. The sub-editor is a journalist - as is the designer, picture editor, photographer and even the stylist.  CMSs could match the flexibility that a software package such as Adobe’s Indesign offers publishers. But then they would be so complicated to use, you would have to hire someone to put up the stories - most probably someone who has the flare for design.

Can you imagine many publishers mirroring their print editorial operations to their online operations? Not when they were originally promised by the futurologists that they would get more revenue for less investment.

I’m not an entrepreneur, but I’m pretty certain that size of the potential reward is often related to the size of the potential risk. But it has already dawned on many organisations that moving operations to the Web is not a license to print money.

But creating something that communicates emotionally with the reader (something that printed magazines are good at) may one day compel these online readers to pay a subscription fee.