Are Fees for Online News Content in the Offing?

A couple of weeks back I posted about the challenges facing the newspaper industry as they deal with declining ad revenues and the migration of readers to free online sources.

http://marketingmemes.blogspot.com/2009/03/time-is-running-out-for-newspapers.html

Now, the New York Times is reporting that the industry is reconsidering its free content for all business model.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/business/media/08pay.html?_r=1&ref=business

At an industry conference last week, newspaper execs explored various options to monetize their content on the Web. Some of the payment models under consideration include:

• Subscription model (e.g., WSJ.com)
  
• Micro-payments (e.g., iTunes)
  
• Content licensing to third-party sites

Of course, in order for this to work, newspapers will to address a major, maybe even insurmountable, challenge: how to get readers to start paying for something that has been free for so long?

U2 CD Leak – Blunder or PR Stunt?

The release of U2’s new CD, “No Line on the Horizon,” is planned for February 27. But it appears they have run into a bit of a SNAFU.

Someone at Universal Music, U2’s music publisher, accidentally put the CD up for sale on getmusic.com.au (the Australian site for Universal’s Get Music online music service) almost two weeks before the official release date. Not surprisingly someone purchased the CD before it was taken down and it wasn’t long before it appeared on peer-to-peer file sharing sites where people are now downloading it for free.

The fact is that most CDs are leaked before official release dates. Which raises the question: was this a blunder or a stunt by U2’s management to generate buzz and pre-empt other leaks to better control publicity around the release?

It’s more than a little suspect that U2’s music publisher “accidentally” posted the CD for sale two weeks before launch. And it has been five years since U2’s last CD (for many artists a dangerously long hiatus). On the other hand, U2 is one of the most recognizable and respected brands in the music business so they’re certainly not suffering from low awareness.

If a stunt, it was nowhere near as sophisticated as Radiohead’s pay-as-you-choose release of “In Rainbows” on its own Web site. Unsophisticated is very un-U2 and considering their strong stance against music piracy it’s likely that this was simply a mistake.

But the fact that it’s a week before the release and buzz is building and people are listening begs the question: when will music labels and publishers accept the future of music distribution and figure out a way to become relevant again?

Has demand for e-books finally reached a tipping point?

Yesterday’s post was about a new digital publishing format, v-books. Today’s post is about e-book readers, a not so new digital publishing delivery platform that may finally be taking off in the U.S.

It was reported yesterday that sales of Amazon’s Kindle may have reached 500K units in 2008. This, according to analysts, may put it ahead of early sales volume levels for Apple’s iPod. It has been a long time coming. I don’t know exactly when e-book readers became commercially available in the U.S., but I know it was at least as early as 2001. In the eight or so years since, consumer demand and adoption have been tepid at best - until now.

I have been a Kindle owner for about five months and am more than pleased with the usability of the product and Amazon’s content delivery platform. However, one disappointment has been the amount of book, and to a lesser extent magazine, titles that are available for download (it would also be nice if it had a color monitor and touch screen capability but maybe that’s asking too much for a product that sells for $359 considering all the other things it does).

That’s why I was happy to hear that Kindle sales topped 500K units last year. As the number of Kindle owners increase the demand for more titles will also increase. For example, about four months ago I did a search in Amazon.com's Kindle store for Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (a modern classic & Pulitzer Prize winner). The book was not available and if I recall correctly there was only one or two Roth titles on hand – a bit of a letdown. Today the book is there along with seven other Roth titles.

Right now, Kindle and digital book downloads are a small percentage of Amazon’s overall sales. But as demand increases that will change. Now I wish someone (Amazon, Apple or mail-a-movie giant Netflix) would offer a viable arrangement for delivering digital movie downloads to box-top sets. There is certainly consumer demand for that innovation.

Kindle 2.0 to be unveiled soon

V-books - YouTube like videos for a fee?

HarperCollins is now offering downloads of v-books on Amazon.com’s digital download store wsj.com is reporting today.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123362056606541549.html

The first book that I’m aware of is Jeff Jarvis’ “What Would Google Do?” The book costs $9.99, is 23 minutes long and is available for download to PCs and mobile devices. Based on the two minute sample on Amazon it appears this v-book is little more than Jarvis speaking into the camera for the full video duration.

Personally, I like the idea especially as relates to business books. Many times I’ll by a business book for $25+ get half way through and put it down. Sometimes I just don’t have the time to read a full business book and let’s face it they can be quite dry. If publishers can synthesize the key points of a business book into 20 or so engaging minutes then they may be on to something.

Of course some business books you just have to read in full format, especially when there are detailed case studies that are critical to understanding the author’s conclusions. And not sure I would be interested in a fiction v-book (there’s something about reading a good piece of fiction that I’m sure would be lost in the translation).

Another alternative for the time challenged business reader is Soundview’s Executive Book Summaries. Annual subscriptions run from $119 - $169. For that you get 30 six to eight page summaries of the top business books published in a given year.

I have subscribed and like the service. While 30 summaries a year is a manageable number, the downside is that it’s likely that quite a few of the titles may not interest you since they span all business categories (marketing, finance, HR, manufacturing, etc).

From what I saw on the Amazon.com demo, the production quality of these v-books’ may not be much better than the average video you see on YouTube but that's not really the point. Worth a try even though $9.99 seems a bit pricey.