Newspapers are in trouble, everyone seems to think this. Most newspapers have seen circulation declines of their paper editions and the web doesn’t pay that well for advertising.
What to do? Lots of obvious ideas like charging monthly fees or having per article charges.
Subscriptions overlook the fact that many people don’t subscribe to newspapers, they buy them each day. Sometimes they buy different ones on different days or go a week without buying one at all.
Per article charges are far too expensive, sometimes as much as 1 cent per word for say a 250 word article costing $2.50. If the article is critical to your business it may be affordable (The FT and the Wall Street journal seem to be doing well in this line) but if it’s about a political crisis or the actions of the local council?
So my first idea on this:
Sell the web based newspaper as an digital artifact, not just a bundle of content or a website subscription.
Allow access to single editions of the newspaper on the internet.
Give away a code inside each paper copy of the newspaper which would be good for reading the articles in that edition online forever. Once you’ve got the code (say in the morning), you can enter it into the newspaper website and your account is then authorized to read the articles from that day’s edition on any device you own.
Maybe you could also buy the codes online without having to buy the paper edition, plus if you got a subscription the content would be authorized automatically. Don’t want a particular day? Don’t need to pay.
Sell blocks of days prepaid in advance for a marginal discount. Because it’s buying a bundle of days rather than a monthly access subscription you should be able to get a slightly higher price, especially since it’s more flexible.
Plus you could make more money by allowing people to buy codes to access previous days, even after the event. Want to read the newspapers from the last major election, buy it now for 2.50. (You could charge more for old editions obviously)
Whether this is the idea to save the newspaper industry or not, I think it will take a lot of clever thinking to solve the problems.