By Josh Chasin
Chief Research Officer, ComScore
mediapost.com
The following are excerpts from Josh Chasin’s post on Mediapost’s “Metrics Insider” column:
There’s a growing sentiment that everything — and certainly everything digital, everything “made of ideas” — should be free. Which means all media content. You know those guys billing you for cable access and selling magazine subscriptions and charging for satellite radio? Hopelessly Old Economy, every one of them. (I’m sure your company, dear reader, has long stopped charging for stuff.)
But if the content should be free, then of course the ads all this free content are designed to push should carry a premium price, right? (The premise being, free content supported by ad revenues.) Well, it turns out, not so much; ad and data exchanges are offering end-around access to publisher audiences — even, sometimes, lookalikes of your own hard-earned visitors — for pennies on the dollar.
So don’t monetize content, and let someone walk away with the majority of your ad sales income.
Am I just hopelessly out of touch with the ways of the New Economy? Because I still think the best business model is charging for stuff. . .
. . .Information, we are told, wants to be free. Well, teenagers want to eat junk food, get high and have unprotected sex, but that doesn’t make it a good idea (and it sure doesn’t make it a business model.) I think perhaps it’s time we sat information down for a heart-to-heart.
Remember back in the ’90s when everyone was calling the Internet the Information Superhighway? At the time I disagreed. I thought it was going to be the Information Supermarket: everything that could be rendered in zeroes and ones would migrate online for distribution. Admittedly, this changes the cost structure of industries. In a near-worst-case scenario, digital distribution of music undermined the record business, not because “music wants to be free,” but because the record business had evolved into a manufacturing and distribution business, not a music business, and the need for physical manufacturing and distribution went away. But I have friends who are musicians, and believe me when I tell you, music doesn’t want to be free.
Let’s think about newspapers. Yes, the newspaper business has a problem, because readers are moving online, and it is more difficult to monetize a digital than a print reader. But this doesn’t mean “journalism wants to be free.” It doesn’t mean “valuable local content wants to be free.” All it means is that when you remove the printing press from the equation, the economics change. Personally I think newspapers will thrive when they work out a way to get over the “paper” part of their business model and focus on the “news” part. But that’s tough to do with that big monster of a press thundering in the basement. . .READ FULL STORY
