Why we don’t subscribe to Rupert Murdoch, and why we need a new kind of money
New Media Age reports that ‘Times Online and theSun.co.uk are likely to start charging for content after News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch ‘indicated such a model could be in place within a year’.
And The Guardian is considering charging users to access specialist areas of its site to counter falling ad revenues.
(I’ll give you a link to the stories, here and here, but with sweet irony N.M.A. has a subscription-only model so you may not be able to read them.)
No surprises here. Their backs to the wall, display advertising collapsing under the weight of social media, traditional news organisations are retreating to a familiar industrial-era mechanism. Copyright, subscription, advertising: they’ve worked for 200 years or more, why won’t they work now?
Well subscription won’t work because newspapers are not niche, not strictly professional (like N.M.A) and definitely not exclusive. Hell, the competition’s free and these days it’s as good if not better than organised, editorialised, branded journalism. I don’t buy my internet news in a newspaper, I pick it out from a broad and fast-moving stream of fragments and favourites and recommendations garnered from twitter, blogs, feeds and aggregators and it’s all free. I might want one little piece of the Guardian one day, two little pieces of the Times the next, I don’t want either all the time so why should I buy 12 month’s worth? You can’t buy my loyalty Mr Murdoch, there’s no value in it for me.
There’s a massive failure of imagination here. We’ve said (again and again) that newspapers and magazine publishers have to make the shift from product to service and until they do that they’ll have nothing to charge for. The web isn’t a walled garden either (with a pay booth) and journalism no longer has to be collected into a proprietorial framework. Spot.us is just one interesting example of an alternative and imaginative approach to making a living out of journalism without the need for Rupert Murdoch’s capital or his distribution network. Spot.us works by popular commissioning. It might fill a gap left by dying newspapers using a business model invented for the social media age. Here’s the elevator pitch:
Spot.us is a nonprofit project to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us journalists can pitch ideas or the public can commission investigations that they then fund with tax deductible donations. If a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, donations are reimbursed. Otherwise content is made available through a Creative Commons license.
Spot.us aside, it’s not just a question of imagination. There’s also a failure of money. Everyone’s complaining that they can’t monetise social media and one reason is that incremental value is very small. Money’s magic is wearing thin when it doesn’t work as a medium of exchange in a massively fragmented world. How do I buy little bits of things with very marginal value (even bits of Guardian, bits of Times).
If a credit/debit card is the only option then it’s simple: I don’t. The social web requires something different to ordinary money, it needs a new currency measured in 100ths or 10ths of cents or pennies that allows us to make simple choices with an ambient mechanism, so that people can choose to acquire tidbits with real value at a fair price, with ease and security.
The debit card, just as it starts to replace cash money on the street, isn’t working on the net. Interestingly, there’s one system that’s already geared up to micropayments (except we need nanopayments) and that’s the billing mechanism for mobile phones. We need Mcash on the net please. Rupert needs it too (truck loads, probably).