I’ll be attending the paidContent:UK mixer on Oct 20 in London. Rob Andrews writes:
The event takes place at Edelman’s HQ in London’s Victoria (105 Victoria Street, SW1E 6QT), with refreshments starting at 5.30pm.
This is an opportunity for readers to network with fellow digital media decision makers, put your questions to an expert panel and to help influence the UK government’s digital media policy. Places are limited. Hope to see you there…
For this event, we are partnering with C&binet, the creativity and business international network created by the government’s Department for Culture, Media & Sport over October 26 to 28 to foster international dialogue about the creative economy.
The inaugural C&binet forum, which sees the department invite leaders from global media and business to generate an international dialogue on the creative economy, will be held a week later. Views heard at our mixer will be aired during the forum, at which I will be moderating a panel with Spotify’s UK MD, Disney’s EMEA VP, Playfish’s CEO and IE:Music’s co-founder Tim Clark.
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The London Evening Standard has confirmed it will relaunch as a free newspaper on 12 October, paidContent:UK has reported.
The paper, bought out by Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev in January, told us it will drop its 50p cover price entirely and be distributed for nothing on the streets of London. The move will see the paper’s daily circulation of around 250,000 more than double to 600,000, giving it a reach comparable to several national newspapers.
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The latest poll on whether people in Britain would be willing to pay for online news content makes gloomy reading for the likes of Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp hounds looking to reverse their enormous £2.1 billion losses in 08/09. If they were looking for a glimmer of hope, they are unlikely to find it in the paidContent:UK/Harris interactive poll published this week.
In a nutshell — and this comes a s no surprise to me — people want to pay nothing or next to nothing.
Let’s let the graphics speak for themselves…
It seems to me that if as a news publisher you are dishing up the standard fare of general stories covering politics, celebrity tittle tattle and sports you are really not going to get very far with building an online revenue stream from your content alone. The key is — and will always be — just how essential, unique or exclusive is your content? If it is set to make a big difference somehow and enable people to make money or create competitive advantage then the price that can be charged is directly proportionate to the value of the information. What hope then for the consumer monsters competing against each other, huge publicly funded organisations such as the BBC, and the legions of bloggers, twitterers and others feeding the social networks? Brand is no longer sufficient to keep and monetise readership. The days of hearing: “Don’t you know it was in The Times, dear chap” as an expression of assurance that something was fair and true are long gone.
Faced with ever expanding choice and being swamped with information, disinformation, opinion and libellous streams from each and every direction, the reader has become far more discerning in its ability to discover, verify and react. While there remains rich and varied streams of content from numerous sources, the reader will remain reluctant to pay. In the paidContent:UK/Harris Interactive poll, a huge 68% say they would be willing to pay just a penny or two to access articles, while the majority, if faced with having to pay and no choice, have indicated they would not pay more than £10 a year. Seems the thumbsuckers need to get sucking again.
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