As you browse FT.com, you have a small status bar at the bottom of your screen, akin to the "life bar" in first-person shooter games that shows you how healthy or injured your character is. In this case, the status bar shows you how many free page views you have left.
If you want to exceed your quota but you don't want to pay, there are other ways. In video games, you can usually replenish your life bar by collecting floating gold coins or stars or mushrooms or what have you; why not do the same on a newspaper site? Scatter them about randomly so that readers are rewarded for exploring different sections of the site, reading to the end of stories, etc. And extra free page views could be only one of the rewards. Readers who compile enough coins/stars/mushrooms could win all sorts of goodies: Free admission to FT conferences, lunch with an FT writer, and so on. (Or maybe this isn't such a good idea, given the evidence that performance-based rewards undermine intrinsic motivation.) Meanwhile, those wet blankets who don't want to play always have the option of handing over their credit card numbers.
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Now, while this has it's upsides and downsides and is certainly fraught with challenges, it is an interesting thought process. What if in order to obtain additional time on the site, in lieu of cash we offered then the opportunity to circumvent the cash option by obtaining additional information such as addresses, e-mail addresses, permission to send e-offers, marketing information and so forth which can be monetized in other ways? What if readers were given credits for each story they read allowing them to read more? Those are pretty traditional ideas and thinking, but let's take it to the next level.
In order to get to the crux of the problem we must realize that our ultimate online goal is to gain results for our advertisers; thus how do we do that? What if we offered incentives to our readers for clicking on and purchasing items from our advertisers on the sites, I.E., someone takes advantage of a downloadable coupon shown on our site and that counts as credit towards further site usage. Better yet, why not figure out a way in which we reward our readers for producing results for our advertisers. In other words, we let them know that our site is paid for by the local advertisers and when you purchase gift certificates from any of our advertisers advertising on the site via the site, that is the same as paying to use the site and you receive site credit for that purchase.
The key to this however would be to have advertisers offering gift certificates for items such as food, gas and so forth that everyone needs anyway. This will seem less demanding and most will assume it is a small price to pay and they have to pay it anyway. On the flip side, forcing site visitors to buy a car in order to utilize the site won't work real well, however if someone does buy a car, they should certainly be rewarded with a lifetime site pass for doing so.
Certainly not perfect and I'm sure many have had thoughts similar to these. The bottom-line is simple, we need to figure out ways to better monetize the online venue. The current push to sale banners, video and so forth is certainly important, but it is really only a means to an end. Fact is that even if we controlled 50% of all the online ad spending in our markets, we're still up a creek without a new angle to this problem of survival.
The world is certainly moving rapidly towards the digital age, print while a player in the game is becoming less so and this trend will no doubt continue. I do believe that print has a life cycle left, only that life cycle is far different than what we currently tend to hold on to.
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Wow, John, I totally love this. And I'm not a proponent for charging for content but this is just fun - and would surely boost newspapers' paltry Gen X and Y numbers. Another way to spif might be for their own contributions - news, comments, photos and videos. I also think newspapers should crowdsource - "we'd like to investigate shady venture X but need $x. Please contribute." Like Spot.us, which is open source, by the way.
ReplyDeleteJohn, I think this is an artificial means to get what legitimate strategies get as a by-product of good content or a useful service. Paying people to use your site (which is what this amounts to) is an act of desperation in my view.
ReplyDeleteCreate a site that is compelling and unique; even if it's only compelling and unique in your market. Creating a game that makes people hop from page to page is not a substitute for a compelling community strategy IMHO.
The concept is interesting and, goodness knows, we need some creative thinking about how to generate revenue for online content.
ReplyDeleteBut before it will work in any serious way, we're going to have to figure out how to create a news Web site that people *want* to spend a lot of time with (and view a lot of pages on). When the average user of a news Web site spends less than two minutes per day on the site, this is much more than just a revenue problem. It's an engagement problem. If news sites don't dramatically increase user engagement, trying to meter usage in some way will affect only a tiny proportion of users -- and unless you can come up with an incredibly appealing value proposition, you will risk p---ing off your most loyal online users.
Michael, I agree with your thoughts, however I will say that most newspapers have the largest traffic of any websites in their local markets already and still can't monetize enough to make a difference.
ReplyDeleteI agree the gimmicks won't work in the end, but enticing people to utilize the advertisers which are funding their romp on the playground might offer a way to motivate the advertisers while offering the users great deals as well.
At the end of the day, do I really care if a visitor comes to my site if I can't monetize that visitor? Not really as it is a wasted expenditure of our energy on a visitor that has no intentions but to freeload.
Monetize what you can, get rid of the rest. I guess that comes back to the quality of the visitor over the quantity of the visitor.
I totally agree with Michael about offering valuable content, but we have to get them there first. I don't suggest that a newspaper Web site should be all about rewards and entertainment, but I do think that no matter where they end up - and hopefully it's with a realization that they should stick around awhile because of the valuable content - they have to start by being lured to the site or we have nothing. Newspapers as a whole are not doing a great job of marketing themselves. they're going through so much effort at evolving and so little effort at telling people they've evolved. That just has to change or it's all for naught.
ReplyDeleteWhile it's nice to want to lure users into becoming more regular users, we can't ignore the fact that online usage of content oriented sites is very different than the "bundled" print world.
ReplyDeleteMany users will never want more than to come in, read one article and move on.
I'm a web developer and read tech blogs often. With even the most popular ones that I am subscribed to I often only read a small percentage of articles that look interesting from headline and first sentence.
That's for a niche topic that I'm already invested in. Now look at the broad topics that newspapers cover. School board meetings will not be interesting to people with no kids etc.
The only difference is now we have analytics to measure these facts.
Pave the cow paths, as they say, but don't try to change usage patterns.
That said, there is a small percentage of your online users that can be converted and do your best to do so.
Just don't expect it to change the patterns of the majority of your site users.