Paid Online News Venture Fails To Get Subscribers 126
Ian Lamont writes "The idea of migrating people from free online news content to paid subscriptions has been dealt a blow. A venture meant to fill the void left by the print Rocky Mountain Times has attracted 3,000 subscribers — just 6% of its original goal of reaching 50,000 paid subscribers by Thursday. InDenverTimes.com is currently free, but the plan was to have gated premium content starting next month for a $5/month subscription. The project has entrepreneurial backing and articles from journalists who used to work for the print-focused Rocky Mountain News, which closed last month. However, a lack of paying subscribers and low online ad rates means that the venture might have to scale back its ambitions."
oblig. (Score:5, Interesting)
Roll-eyes (Score:4, Interesting)
Surprise, surprise.
You mean people won't pay for something they can just as easily get for free?
Really, who didn't see this one coming?
What value are they adding to the "news" when, between the TV news websites and Google News for all the other locals who are NOT participating in this doomed venture, people get what they want?
The only way this could work is if EVERY relevant news outlet decided to do this simultaneously. It would only take ONE outlet not participating to ruin the model.
These guys need to realize that they need to give up on a dead and dying model of how information is distributed. The old media moguls who still run the show don't get it. That they can't up with another solution speaks to their actual lack of vision and creativity. Hey, Murdoch, if you're so fucking smart, why can't you and your people come up with a product that people want to buy?
No PR (Score:4, Interesting)
I live in Denver and always preferred the Rocky Mountain News to the Denver Post, the local paper that has so far survived. I'm a news junkie and get all my content almost exclusively online. I never heard of InDenverTimes.com until this morning.
While the summary's conclusion may be correct — migration from print to web may very well be a futile endeavor — it's an entirely different story if people in the target demographic know nothing of the venture. Let's at least acknowledge this for what it is: in large part, a failure of publicity.
Re:Because... (Score:3, Interesting)
While I agree in part with this sentiment, I think there is room for paid content on sites.
Case in point, if you subscribe to New Scientist you get access to their full online articles. Not all are truncated, but there are some very juicy articles that are. There's also the Slashdot model that is in use on many other sites - articles are free, but are delayed and have ads for non-subscribers. Both methods seem to work, the first because you still get hard print, the second because people are always going to want to get the news first.
Unfortunately, in this day and age, if you're not offering free NEWS, as opposed to editorial articles, people won't pay. If the papers aren't willing to change their business model they won't survive, which is pretty much what we see happening with a lot of media lately.
But The Tyee brings in money (Score:5, Interesting)
People will pay for good journalism, at least if they feel that the conventional outlets aren't doing the job.
Re:I'm actually convinced that the broken model is (Score:1, Interesting)
With internet advertising you have direct clicking actually showing results without any ambiguity. You know the cost/value of any advert.
It's people like you, who have no clue about advertising, which are responsible for the current advertising problem.
Most people will respond to an advertisement after they've seen it X number of times, where X is between 3 and 5.
According to your idiotic opinion, the first 2-4 views have zero value (because there was no click) - however if they didn't see them, then the actual response will never happen.
Think about it: how many TV advertisements are based on people stopping *everything* they're doing and rushing out to buy the product? Exactly zero. Why? because people would never actually do that. Why is the internet so different?
Just because we can measure that someone responded to an ad, it doesn't mean that their lack of response to the other ads was a measure of disinterest.
Re:It's always the same story (Score:1, Interesting)
Except 'selling ads' doesn't work and it doesn't come close to the amount of money made from print ads. But declining print ad revenue is what ultimately did in the print edition of the Rocky Mountain News. For years they fought a circulation and ad war with the Denver Post, with both sides cutting subscription rates and ad costs to steal readers and advertisers from each other. The News blinked first, when their losses cornered them into a "joint operating agreement" with the Post to forestall closing up years ago. The Post got the only Sunday edition, with the highest ad revenue. The News was left with the much less profitable Saturday edition. They both tried raising rates after the JOA, but the market wouldn't bear the increases they needed to make up for a decade of losses and operating on borrowed money. Meanwhile, Craig's list took over much of the classified ad business (the papers raised their rates for private party ads, defying the main lesson of Econ 101, thus effectively surrendering to on-line media). It remains to be seen if the Post can survive. While their in-town rival is gone, the competition from on-line media is as fierce as ever.
Try looking at successful paid content. (Score:4, Interesting)
The newspapers are doing it wrong. I pay an absurd amount of money for news services that actually report news.
Stratfor is the cheapest one that I use, and I appreciate it for its global reporting and analysis of situations that happens to be (gasp!) unbiased! They literally just provide the facts and logical analysis. If they did local news I'd pay them more.
Re:It's always the same story (Score:2, Interesting)
I try to be tolerant of website ads. The closest I've come to using an ad blocker is to edit my hosts file to send particularly buggy ad providers to the bitbucket. But I finally broke down and reinstalled Flashblock a few weeks ago. You're right that sites need to start filtering ads for quality. It's just too annoying when a flash ad starts blaring noise at me as soon as I open a webpage. And while I am actually quite pleased with how unobtrusive the ads are on ABC.com, I noticed that NBC.com uses the same annoying practice of making the sound volume on their ads 10x the volume of their shows. Fortunately the mute button on my laptop works just as well as the mute button on the remote.
And don't get me started on Yahoo video ads. Every time I see that Scottrade cursor guy jerking around the screen making unintelligible noises and stupid faces I wonder whether Scottrade realizes they are paying to annoy potential customers with a video player that has all the capability of RealPlayer circa '99 without the useful BUFFERING notice.
Re:It's the lockdown paradox.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Things are only going to get worse for newspapers. First they were replaced by TV and the internet for raw reporting, as by the time they reported anything it was literally yesterday's news. Their response was to do more opinion pieces, interpreting and discussing news.
Now even that has been replaced by the internet (blogs in particular) and 24 hour news channels. Classifieds all moved to Craigslist, readership went down and advertising went down with it. The only area they can hang on to is convenience, being able to read the paper on the way to work or away from the PC/TV. Mobile phones and devices like the Kindle look set to take over that too.
Newspapers are dying. It's no-ones fault, it's just the march of technology. There is a lot of nostalgia but that alone does not make it a bad thing.