YouTube going the Freemium route?
YouTube: Considering Pay Model For Premium TV |
| Wayne Friedman of MediaPostNews, Dec 16, 2009 04:28 PM |
 Looking to hop on the current pay-for-premium video train, YouTube says it is a considering a pay subscription model — in part to attract more premium TV program producers to its business.
YouTube is considering running TV shows with no advertising for a fee, according to a report in Reuters. This comes in the middle of a recent trend that big TV networks seem to be rallying around, creating new pay-video digital services, with no advertising. Currently, Hulu.com — a venture of three of the big TV/media companies — is a free, ad-supported service. There is speculation that it could add a pay component. YouTube is looking to aggressively grow its list of full-length programs to complement the user-generated short video clips that are still the base of its operation. Major TV advertisers are leery about aligning themselves with unfiltered, sometimes questionable copyright content. Some years ago, this pushed YouTube to establish separate channels for premium TV producers. YouTube has established separate channels for the likes of CBS, NBC, ABC, and the BBC. It also has content from CNN, TNT, and ESPN. The report in Reuters said that at the end of the day, content partners could choose the format that works best for them. YouTube could model the new business in the form of monthly subscription models that cable system operators used. |
Newspapers Grapple With How – or Even Whether – to Erect a Pay Wall
While a Growing Number Seek to Charge, There’s No Consensus on Best Model
by Nat Ives of AdAge
Published: October 26, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The push for newspapers to charge their online readers reached wild-rumpus status last week, as Newsday.com announced a pay wall, a big deal for the country’s 12th biggest paper, and New York Times readers begged the paper to let them pay to read the site.
“I want to pay for my online use of The New York Times,” read one comment on a Times article about 100 new job cuts in the newsroom. “Start charging for the work of your reporters!” said another.
And now Journalism Online, a company established this year to help newspapers experiment with pay models, is poised to send software to some “beta publishers” by early December. “There was a big debate about ‘if’” media should charge for online content, said Steven Brill, co-founder of Journalism Online. “That debate is over.”
Well, it is and it isn’t. The party is getting bigger, but some papers are already saying they’ll stay away.
Going From Free to Paid
TV Futures: Charging For Online Shows |
| Diane Mermigas of MediaPost, Oct 23, 2009 02:44 PM |
| Hulu’s online video platform may be a success with the masses, but it will have to begin charging for at least some of its content if it doesn’t want to destroy the $185 billion television ecosystem it draws from.Broadcast and cable TV are under siege by the very interactive digital technology that will extend their profitability. Television networks are finding it difficult to aggregate large audiences that generate ad revenues and fees to underwrite production. New platforms like Hulu could possibly help to ease that financial imbalance. However, the longer the ad-supported video hub remains free, the more it contributes to television’s demise, according to a new report by Soleil Securities analyst Laura Martin. Her arguments and math are clear-cut. (more…) |
Dear WSJ: To Avoid Google Disease, Please Put A Condom On Your Content
by Danny Sullivan on October 22, 2009
I’d thought I’d heard it all in the debate over Google and newspapers, but yesterday Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson took it up a notch. He accused Google of making people slutty. If we’re using sexual metaphors now, here’s another one. Why doesn’t the Wall Street Journal and News Corporation in general put a condom around all of its content, to protect itself from Google? There’s a good brand called robots.txt that will help.
The accusation was lobbed at yesterday’s Web 2.0 Summit session called “Wither Journalism.” Be sure to watch the video, which I’ve listed at the end of this post. I’ll also link to key sections of the video, as well. It’s a stunning contrast between two cultures, Thomson and Google’s vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer, who was also on the panel
The Most Important Things in Life are Free
Oct 13, 2009 -
Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired and author of Free, recently gave a keynote speech at Garage’s Revenue Bootcamp. The main points of his speech were:
Digital economics has created a deflationary economy in which there is near zero marginal costs for distribution. Hence, content is getting cheaper and approaching free.
Today’s generation expects things for free because people have internalized these digital economics. Adults, by contrast, grew up believing that “free” is a gimmick—i.e. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” (Watch this panel of young people to see the accuracy of this observation.)
Quality is more and more defined by relevance and not price. Thus, you can’t use price to win market share when everything is free. You have to use product differentiation and relevance.
The challenge for companies is to create premium goods and services that they can sell to “free” customers. Companies need to offer people ways to save time, increase their status, or heighten their reputation and convert these ways to cash.
If you’re in a content or online service business, you’re well aware of the pressure to lower your prices to free. The key point is that what customers are willing to buy is far more important than what you’re willing to sell. To learn more about Chris’s concept, watch his keynote here.
Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: newyorker.com
Priced to Sell
Is free the future?
by Malcolm Gladwell July 6, 2009
At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. “I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device—not just ones made by Amazon?” He was incredulous. “That, to me, is not a model.”
