The Daily Telegraph is serialising a new book by Alexander McCall Smith. Full serialisation has never completely gone away, and even online serialisation has what could almost be called a long history. The original feature of this new serialisation is its interactivity - podcasts, RSS, Google Maps, character profiles and reader comments. As an analyst, I think this is a great idea; as a normal person (the two are exclusive), I wouldn't read a straightforward book serialisation on my computer ... but the interactivity makes the online format much more appealing. I wonder what Dickens would make of all this.
I want to pay newspapers for their content, if only they'd let me
Micropayments have long been untrendy and generally the micropayments (non)industry has been a disaster. I remain a fan though, because micropayments solve real problems, real market inefficiencies. One of these is in the newspaper industry.
In the old days, when I bought a newspaper, I gave the newspaper 50p in exchange for a pile of writing. They gave me a pile of writing in exchange for 50p. Now, online, I give them nothing. They give me ads, but it's not a propos of anything relevant.
Here is the top story on The Guardian as I write this post:
There is nothing wrong with those ads: The Guardian is just trying to make an honest living. But although me and The Guardian's revenue machine are both on the same page, I act like I don't care about their ads, and they act like they don't care about what I am actually reading. We're both talking past each other, we're not having a "50p-writing" direct exchange of value. Even if I do click on an ad, my psychology when I do so is that I am transacting with the advertiser - not with the hosting newspaper. And although advertising underpins printed newspaper revenues, online it seems clumsy that the content is being monetised so irrelevantly (not only that, but online automatically cuts out the cover price revenues). Contextual advertising isn't a great solution either because we are decades away from contextual advertising for non-commercial news stories.
That was a bit waffley, but here is where micropayments come in. I want to pay newspapers for good writing. Not for a story like the one above, perhaps, which is a minor update to something I've read fifty times this year, but for original, thoughtful or entertaining content. I want to have a direct financial conversation that says, I liked this specific article, I want to give you 2p or 5p or whatever for it. Specifically for your writing. But I can't do that.
Now, newspapers already acknowledge the possibility that readers may want to contribute financially out of goodwill:
So here is my proposal:
- Various newspapers of the same ilk get together. Say the broadsheets, for starters, but anyone else targeting the same audience can join (Le Monde, The Economist, Monocle, Prospect, etc).
- These newspapers create some kind of "Friends of the Newspapers" scheme. Like being a friend of an art gallery or museum. Offer some benefits, like invitations to events, or loyalty points or a special badge. To join, people have to hand over £10. It's not a payment, readers just deposit it. They can get it back whenever they want. The aim of this scheme is not the club itself (so, for example, you can't sell people's contact details) - the real purpose of this scheme is to solve the main weakness of micropayments (the cost of debiting tiny transactions), by creating a deposit account held by the newspapers on behalf of readers.
- Meanwhile, back on the newspaper websites, nothing changes (still all free, still showing ads). But below each article, there is now a feedback bar, like the stars on YouTube:
- So now, when you read an article, you can decide whether to give the newspaper from 0p to 5p depending on how much you like the article. The money is deducted from your £10. Most of the time, you won't give them anything.
The key is that this must be as simple as star ratings are on YouTube. Don't ask me to reconfirm this or that, don't ask for a backup password, don't redirect me anywhere. And it must include a perpetual logon like many Google properties use.
Would readers sign up, i.e. would anyone ever choose to voluntarily hand over money? I don't know. I would, but then I'm from the minority that believes illegal file sharing is illegal. I'm also from the minority that reads publications like Monocle, so I believe in funding a future of good quality writing. But publications like The Guardian, that clearly have a strategy for producing good quality writing online, must believe that readers see value in such writing. So perhaps the more relevant question is not, will readers pay for that value, but do readers perceive that such value exists?
Will it work for all content? No, certainly not for news stories available from hundreds of sources - the kind of stories newspapers publish so as not to seem behind, rather than for the positive value that they add. It is more likely to work for analysis and opinion pieces, or travel suggestions, which for me is an added bonus, because there are precious few sources of such content anyway. In fact, readers will now have a say in what kind of content gets written - there will be non-monetary benefits in creating a loyal audience with a stake in your content.
Would it make any money? Say an online newspaper gets 5 million UK visitors a month. 10% join the scheme, so 500,000. Giving 10p a month across several of a newspaper's articles (my personal level is more likely to be £1-£2). So £50,000 a month, or £600k a year. Is that enough to be of interest? Well, perhaps not when, say, DMGT makes £100M off its digital properties.
The other area where such a scheme could work is online video from the main TV companies. If when watching a replay of Jane Eyre online, I could contribute towards similar programmes (i.e. specifically towards period dramas), I would gladly give £1. Forget the fact that I pay a licence fee, now I would have a real say in what the BBC makes (that could backfire on me, if 10 million people decide they want endless versions of Big Brother...).
The ideal end-game for all this? One day I will be able to fine newspapers up to 5p for every time they write about Paris Hilton... but I'm getting carried away.
Google Map Maker sortof comes to the UK
Google Map Maker, which lets users edit Google Maps and add details of locations such as hospitals or schools, has been available since last week for the Isle of Man. Here is a screenshot from the capital, Douglas:
You can add map elements from a predefined list:
As a user, you can subscribe to updates for a particular neighbourhood.
How much traffic do UK newspapers buy through AdWords?
Countervalue (the blog of The Telegraph's Justin Williams) has posted a few times (here, here, here, among others) about the AdWords keyword purchases of newspapers such as The Guardian and The Times. Countervalue takes a more hostile tone than I think the issue warrants, or than seems objective coming from a competitor, but nonetheless raises some interesting points.
Countervalue's main argument is that newspapers are buying traffic that they cannot monetise (especially that they cannot monetise to a higher value than they paid to acquire that traffic). And huge amounts of traffic at that. If this is true, it is of course unsustainable, certainly unimaginative and perhaps foolish. And it would highlight a weakness of AdWords that I have mentioned before: Eric Schmidt has always positioned AdWords as a sales cost, not a marketing cost, because he says AdWords pays for itself, but I have yet to see evidence for that claim.
So how much traffic are these newspapers buying for themselves? Countervalue estimates, roughly, that The Guardian spends £30,000 per month, based on 1p per click. I suspect he may have guessed the £30,000 based on his expertise (being an analyst, I obviously think there is nothing wrong with that) and then tried to fit the numbers a little ungenerously (1p a click seems too low, and looks like a way to suggest that The Guardian buys 3 million visitors a month through AdWords, which sounds very unlikely to me). However, £30,000 does not seem unreasonable, given that anything less than £10,000 per month would not be worth doing for a website as big as The Guardian, and anything over £100,000 per month should start raising alarm bells for whoever is approving the budget there.
Time to check out what ads these newspapers really are buying.
1. Actual keywords bought today
Here are the ads that I could find, after having a jolly good think about what keywords I would buy if I ran a newspaper, based on events in the past 24 hours. I came up with chris hoy, christine ohuruogu, jade goody, john terry, jeremy clarkson, uk news, ken livingston (sic, as they say) and gordon brown. I also went through many others such as Olympics, Georgia, Giles Coren, etc but found no ads for those:
Here are the AdWords cost estimates for those ads:
So, about £5,000 across all newspapers in one month. Assuming a lot of major keywords that I did not think of, say £10,000, and assuming a long tail that I could not find, make that £20,000 of AdWords purchases across all newspapers in one month.(There are other caveats: AdWords may have few historical searches for Chris Hoy, but today there will be more searches than usual, for example). And The Sun seems to buy most of the keywords (that may vary by day).
And how much traffic can you buy? 10,000 clicks according to the AdWords table, so 40,000 clicks per month taking into account the keywords I may have missed.
2. Potential keywords that could have been bought
Let's take the top newspapers (The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Sun, The Mirror, The Daily Mail) and guess analyse from today's front pages what the top keywords might be. I've gone across them all rather than individually as many of the keywords are duplicated:
georgia, olympics, john terry, gary glitter, jeremy clarkson, blonksa, house prices, gordon brown, lily allen, amy winehouse, paris hilton, cheryl cole
Actually, my main impression is that you can't buy good keywords for most of these stories, because the keywords are too broad (e.g. "baa" for the BAA Competition Commission story, or "Arsene Wenger" for the many Wenger stories today), or because that is not how people will find a story (what sensible keywords can you buy for The Guardian's front page story about Britons using too much water, or The Mirror's front page story about whether you can haggle over prices in Britain?).
Anyway, here are the AdWords cost estimates for those keywords:
So, about £100,000 per month. Again, assuming major keywords that I missed, say £200,000 per month, and assuming a long tail, make that £300,000 of possible total spend by newspapers.
And how much traffic can you buy? 60,000 clicks according to the AdWords table, so 180,000 clicks per month taking into account the keywords that I may have missed. Which is nice, but perhaps not the main source of the massive increases that some newspapers are experiencing online.
Churchill, Byron writing for The Times
This is a fantastic idea from The Times for their banner quotations (I don't know the technical term), using their newly online archive. I hope the clickthrough rates are fantastic.
And in what might be an unfair comparison, here are the same for their normal writers:
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