With all the renewed talk of charging for content, damn it, there is too little reference to the experience the news industry has: TimesSelect. We know how many subscribers they had and how much revenue came in but it would be a tremendous mitzvah to the news business and journalism if The Times would open up its TimesSelect books and let us know exactly the business details of the shuttered experiment in paid content. This would allow the discussion about the relative net value of paid subscribers vs. free readers occur with more information. Among the things I’d like to see:
* Number of subscribers by type — fully paid, free-with-subscription, free-education — and how much each paid.
* Renewal rates (though experience with that will be limited).
* Subscriber acquisition costs, with conversion rates in marketing.
* Retention marketing costs.
* Customer-service costs.
* CPMs for advertising to paid users.
* Traffic patterns after TimesSelect was stopped: how many incremental users and pageviews.
* CPMs for advertising to free users.
* Google rank of Times and Times features before and after TimesSelect – and traffic to The Times through Google in both periods.
What else?
The Times wouldn’t really be releasing treasured secrets; it’s not charging now. But by releasing this data for others to analyze, it would be doing the industry a huge service.
Indeed, I believe that other companies that have experimented with different models should release similar stats. In most cases, they don’t have competitors. And the more we learn as an industry, the better. As part of the New Business Models for News Project at CUNY, I’m happy to play host for this data. We need to get real about specifics in the discussion of business models. I am among those who have been talking in theories and possibilities and I want to see spreadsheets.
Agreed. But they’ll never do it.
cnn’s “pipeline” might be a good one to compare newspaper v. tv
Hooray, Jeff.
Yes, this would be very helpful in moving the debate away from opinion to fact. However, we need to acknowledge that TimesSelect was one experiment in paid content, not necessarily the definitive execution. Therefore we must be careful not to draw too broad a conclusion by assuming that the specific results of TimesSelect are a proxy for future paid content efforts at the Times or elsewhere. Nevertheless, we can admire the Times’ attempt to experiment, and learn from it.
I don’t know if we’ll get the data but I am glad to see you asking for it. Open-mindedness becomes you.
Kind regards,
Evan
Could the media be more out to lunch?
Why does it need to be an either or model?
The Travel Channel hosts free online content while simultaneously charging for ‘Travel Channel University’ courses that teach people the fine art of pro video capturing and editing.
Bonus: TC then aggregates all the video submissions from their videopgraphers to feature on their cable channel. In effect they’ve charged people to provide content to them.
Just think what the Times could do charging for some things that people are willing to assign definite value to.
How about you go first, Jeff, and let everyone know how much you make each month off Google ads? Transparency. It’s what Google would do.
Lead by example.
I have revealed my blog earnings here and in a column and in the book. Enough disclosure for you? I haven’t done my 2008 taxes and accounts yet. But in 2007, I earned $13,300 in ads on the blog, about $4k of that from Google. I don’t have the exact figures with me, but I suspect that’s close enough for you. There you have it.
Actually the Google contract does not allow divulging specifics of ad earnings and costs. So much for transparency.
Good call. This would help the industry.
[...] NY Times: Please open the TimesSelect books [...]
Jeff, how about you stop pimping that old-fashioned print-style book and offer it online for free?
You could show us something about how that works.
Just a thought.
Jeff, you’re right, we need some real numbers to understand how paid content can or cannot work. I’ve started to put together some hypotheses based on real figures from a newspaper website. We started with the current ad-only revenue from the site. Then we had a look at a full paid model. We also looked at a mix free / paid model.
People can play around with the assumptions in my excel file… please take a look:
http://mediacafe.blogspot.com/2009/02/newspaper-charging-or-not-for-online.html
Just updated numbers with feedback that we’ve received…
Also the NY Times should admit defeat in its undeclared war against bugmenot, and just drop registration.
I think one reason TimesSelect failed is that it was very poorly marketed. The Times seemed to assume that all they needed to do was create a colorful TimesSelect banner/badge with a picture of Dowd or Friedman and that would be enough to convince people to pay.
Anyone who has ever sold content online knows that it all starts with the “offer.” The most crucial aspect is what people see and read right before they decide to enter their credit card number. TimesSelect didn’t understand this. Their offer was weak and unimaginative. High perceived value (low actual cost) premiums play a key role in motivating people to pay. WSJ knows this. There’s so much the Times could have offered.
For one example, genealogy research is hugely successful online and there are many successful businesses serving the field. TimesSelect offered access to its archives back to the 1800s. (Now free, I believe.) Anyway, with a little work, TimesSelect could have appealed to the whole genealogy field. Anyone whose ancestors might have appeared in the Times archives…Lots of educational connections, too.
When you signed up for TimesSelect, they could have sent you an email inviting you to research your ancestors in the TimesSelect database. A link could have taken them to a site where they could see what others have done, how easy it was to find stuff, examples of what people did with the stories once they found them, etc.
This is just one example. The marketing of TimesSelect could have segmented the marketing of the service based on people’s profession. Give them a free trial but capture some basic data on them–and the customize the conversion process based on that info…Lots of b2b businesses can do that and it could be applied successfully to the Times and, I think, even top metro dailies around the country.
Just to clarify … my suggestion was that as your book tour continues, you disclose on an ongoing basis how much you make each month from Google ads. Will you agree to do that?
I make about $100 a month from Google ads now. It rarely varies. My blood type is O+. My shoe size is 12 C. Anything else?
Jeff:
Agreed – But I’ll take it further. The whole industry, from soup to nuts, needs a transparent / open source approach to figuring out to make news a financially viable enterprise in the future.
We’ll never get there as long as each organization is toiling on their own, behind closed doors. That’s fine when an industry has some stability. But when the industry as a whole is going down, the organizations need to join forces and work collaboratively to share insights & learnings — that’s how you accelerate learning and, hopefully, discover viable new enterprises before the old ones sink altogether. Otherwise, as Ben Franklin said, “If we don’t hang together, we shall hang separately.”
And so, if we were to move toward this transparent / open source model of innovating the future, we’d need to regard the TimesSelect experience, as Evan Rudowski says above, as just *one* experiment of many. And it would be in studying and learning from *all* the experiments that we would (collectively and collaboratively) find the new viable business model / models.
That’s my main point. But if you’re interested in more:
– On why the New York Times should go totally open source on finding a new business model:
http://future-of-news.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-new-york-times-can-save-itself.html
– On why newspapers should create a massive, joint experimentation program:
http://future-of-news.blogspot.com/2008/05/if-i-were-newspaper-publisher-today.html
[...] wordt toch weer voorzichtig gedacht aan het laten betalen voor delen van de content. En mediagoeroe Jeff Jaris vraagt aan het bedrijf om te laten zien wat het verdiende met het betalen voor content via Times Select, zodat anderen een [...]
[...] 06, 2009 – 10:33 am NY Times: Please open the TimesSelect books by Jeff [...]