Steve Brill Provides More Details Of Payment Platform “Journalism Online”
Steve Brill has been determined for years to get people to stop getting their news for free, starting up and then shutting down a variety of ventures along the way. Yesterday he outlined more details of his latest wheeze, Journalism Online. The only way they could have named it more blandly would be to go with “Words On A Screen”, but let’s not dwell on that.
It’s a payment platform that Brill’s been working on for a while – Christie Hefner expressed Playboy’s support for it when we spoke to her a couple of months back. It’s a customisable bundle of different pricing options, from micropayments for individual articles (which Brill rightly believes is not really going to work) to subscriptions and print/digital packages. Brill’s also announced that referrals to other content producers will generate revenue, just as click-through advertising does (i.e. not very much). And he’s sort of modelling it all on the Wall Street Journal model, with premium content put behind the pay wall; Brill’s business partner is Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the WSJ.
They believe they can get newspapers to convert the most loyal 10% of readers into subscribers, while retaining the majority of the advertising revenue they currently make. Not too sure about that second claim – it’s based on that 10% of readers creating 88% of page views – but at least they’ve realised that you can choose to have a lot fewer readers and make a lot more money, a la Financial Times.
Where this won’t work is if people have to go to Journalism Online to get it – it’s just not a strong enough brand name. If they can make the platform a purely back-end process, and let people interact with the brands they know and trust, then it’s going to have legs. Or perhaps if they provide consumers with their own customisable platform as a base for all their subscriptions to land in, almost like a social networking profile, that could prove to be compelling and another platform for advertising. As Brill is developing it with his own capital, it’ll remove the cost for newspapers to fund their individual pricing platforms, so hopefully when he turns up at their door with the whole thing ready to roll, they’ll get on board.
It’s set to launch in the autumn with a “significant number of publishers” according to Brill – fingers crossed it’ll work out.
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | June 25, 2009 12:09PM |
