Re: Will They Pay? was RE: Salon.com and taller ads

From: Michael Martinez <Michael_at_xenite.org>
Date: Fri 11 May 2001 09:50:12 -0500

JOHN GASKILL <gm_at_info-central-usa.com> WROTE:

>The fact that people don't want to pay is nothing new.
>People around the world would prefer to get things
>free if they could.
>
>The reality is that people ARE paying for content on
>the web delivered through web sites. The WSJ Interactive
>version is only one example. You hit the nail on the
>head in your own self-conflicted statements, first alleging
>that people will not pay, then conceding that they will
>and admitting that you do. You pay for the NYT by
>giving them your name and e-mail address.

Actually, the reality is that MOST people currently
refuse to pay, according to the latest research.
However, a study published in February indicates
that Spanish-language users are most apt to pay for
content:

http://www.onlinepublishingnews.com/htm/n20010212.053895.htm

The same study, by Forrester Research, indicates only
10% of Americans are willing to pay for content (all
types combined), whereas only 4% are willing to pay
for news. "More people would be prepared to pay for
books, music and porn."

>The secret is to provide something that people want,
>are willing to pay for, and is priced attractively enough
>to generate a large audience. To get subscribers
>who pay, advertise widely and provide free, but limited
>sampling. If the content is news before anyone else,
>provide a list of the articles you have broken, etc.

Well, if your target audience is the American surfing
public, you can't even expect more than 10% to pay
for porn (which I assume is the highest grossing
content, but I don't have anything on which to base
that assumption).

And, yes, I had this link back in February. I'm not
sure of what I didn't post it. I apologize for that.

A slightly earlier report (also from February) also
concluded that content would not pay its way:

http://www.onlinepublishingnews.com/htm/n20010206.041846.htm

"The message that comes across from the conclusions
of this meeting is that the companies best placed to
succeed in the new media world are those that have
already succeeded in the hard print world."

This seems to exclude the vast majority of business
sites.

I have provided a lot of scoops on my site that even
the major media have been slow to pick up (I broke the
news that Peter Jackson was doing "The Lord of the Rings"
two days before anyone else published it in 1998, for
example). That and a dollar will get me a twenty-minute
phone call.

Quality of content, newsworthiness, they don't really
pay the bills. Most people are willing to wait until
the free sites pick it up. Heck, you can get almost
anything spidered by Google from their cache, including
the full text of many PDF files now (without having to
load up the Adobe reader). It's true that Google will
honor certain exclusion conventions, but most sites
don't include them. You pretty much have to password-
protect directories on your site to keep the spiders
from republishing your content.

And most businesses, unlike the Wall Street Journal,
cannot afford to keep their content out of the major
search engines. If I had to pick only one search service
to be listed in (assuming I got top ten listings), it
would be Google. That gets you into Yahoo!'s secondary
pages, and my statistics are similar to most other
people's, I'm sure. That Google/Yahoo! juggernaut is
simply unbeatable. Despite my best efforts to get high
rankings in all the major search engines and directories,
Google.com and Google.yahoo.com accounted for 25% of my
search engine referrals in March.

Yahoo! by itself threw in another 12% or more. So, I'm
getting 1/3 of my search service referrals from just
Google/Yahoo! And I think most people
who have followed my career with the search engines and
directories would agree I do very well across the board.
There are some of the so-called "majors" where I no
longer pay any attention. They just don't send enough
traffic to be worth the trouble.

Your mileage may vary, but if only 1 out of 10 Americans
are willing to pay for content, and if most content is
going to be cached by Google, I'd say the pay-for-content
camp has a severe uphill battle. I foresee heavy losses
for their side, too.

Michael Martinez
Science Fiction and Fantasy info_at_xenite.org
Visualizing Middle-earth, a book for all Tolkien fans
 http://www.xenite.org/



Received on Fri May 11 2001 - 09:50:12 CDT