Comments on: Want to charge for content online? Make it three dimensional

By: Stephen

Stephen — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:31:19 +0000

Thanks Reda – disagreements welcome!
True value matters as well as cost, but one has to presume that the value is going to be higher than the cost (else let’s throw in the towel now). There are a bunch of things like consumer email that provide considerable user value, but because the marginal costs are so low, nobody’s going to be in business long charging for it.
Also, i’d say instant news is one of the many advantages the web has over newspapers. The newspapers need to focus on figuring out why instant is not so good.
Ed – devices as service delivery vehicles – absolutely, and whether you look at it from the content point of view, or the device pov, it;s the same thing – a bundle adds value to both.
Re advertising to Steve – that’s not advertising, that’s having a dialogue with your customer. Forget those who aren’t your customers, just focus on the ones that are, and get them to do your sales job.

By: ed

ed — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:00:07 +0000

Interesting stuff. I am not sure that you are thinking about the complete picture. Both Apple and (to a lesser extent) Amazon are in the econtent business grudgingly to support their devices. Interestingly both ipods/phones and Kindles are, or might be, vehicles for distributing “news” based on the dimensions you introduce. The pool of money to share is (potentially) a lot larger if you are selling a real device with real margins- all we are waiting for is the flexible, folding, refreshable, wi-fi/3G connected display (aka “journalism carrier” aka “enewspaper”).

On the advertising piece a challenge there is that advertisers need volume to build brand/awareness. The micro targeted stuff is below the line lead generation, which in many companies is a different department, and a different budget. Advertisers know what to say to a “male, single, 25-35 in zip 12345″, they are less clear what to say to “Steve.”

By: Reda

Reda — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:45:54 +0000

Good read… I think this is simply the same old story of a product that needs a value-based proposal instead of a cost+ one to survive. As you mentioned above, we could argue that the marginal cost in a digital age is zero. However, the cost of delivery is irrelevant because what is driving down the price is actually “the value” the product is delivering to the final user. Moreover, what you list as the three magical dimentions (personalisation, contextuality and usefulness) are to me just a gross generalisation of the consumer needs (ok, i appreciate that it fits perfectly with your blog url, still ). I may for example prefer instant news at the cost of contextuality. I hope I don’t come across as agressive as it seems but I just wanted to add my disagrement with some of your statements. Just for the sake of clarity, I still like reading your blog
-Reda

By: Stephen

Stephen — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:46:51 +0000

Agreed Timo, and I don’t think that’s going away just yet. To me the choice of what else is relevant is part of the value of personalization. You’ve decided to chose that newspaper rather than another because you generally trust the choices it makes in filtering those 10bn pages (and the stuff that’s not on the web). By narrowing the focus (e.g. helsinki fly fisherman weekly magazine) or enlarging it (e.g. international herald tribune) you are explicitly endorsing different degrees of randomness or echo-chamber.

To me the twitter and FB feed have largely replaced trying to create my own igloogle aggregator home page, as it seems more likely to me that my friends will do a better job in surfacing what’s interesting, than my predetermined choice of news sources, all of which vary in quality day by day.

Surfacing personalized, interesting and relevant – but not too similar – content will be one of the more interesting growth areas to watch, and one in which there’s lots of scope to improve, imo.

By: Timo Tervo

Timo Tervo — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 15:38:37 +0000

A very good read, indeed! I tend to agree on the base notion (if I didn’t miss it totally) that people tend to buy content in packages that also have other benefits to them (iTunes: immediacy, portability etc, or newspaper: portability, excellent format for glancing at, fish & chips wrapper – and the hat).

Now, why do I still keep subscribing the Helsingin Sanomat as a paper edition, 7 days a week while having gone otherwise mostly on-line? I think I’m liking the form factor for the breakfast table, but I’d say there’s something else in this ‘dying format’, a thing I might call some kind of “predictable unpredictability”.

While I always enjoy tech news and read them also in detail in HS, they’re pretty basic and often inaccurate to a degree – so I go on-line to hit my favorite tech sites for whatever I’m really interested in. But with the other stuff on culture pages, housing or travel I go “oh, interesting” and would have never come across those news or columns by accident on the web. I know there probably are dedicated travel blogs geared for Finnish audiences and all that, but I’m not *that much* into travel, hence, the newspaper article is likely enough. And I can always find more on-line.

The predictability is the familiar sections and unpredictability (to a degree) is to get educated about something I didn’t know to anticipate. One could argue that the same is true for the news on-line, but, I don’t know why, I tend to jump to a couple of topics and dig deeper in those. Depth (generally speaking), not width is encouraged by hypertext when it comes to news to me.

The lack of personalization and context is a possible cause of this in my case, but many of the earlier attempts fail, to me at least. Like the mobile edition at m.hs.fi has the ‘most read’ articles and they tend to be, well, not the foreign affairs or economy pieces I might enjoy but more on the Paris Hilton-Formula1 -style stuff I’m expecting to entertain myself on another site.

Also, the effort of personalizing an aggregator site (say, yahoo.com) and re-doing it from time to tome to better match interests is not time well spent, in my opinion. This needs to be more automatic, but not at the expense of amplifying the echo chamber where the site eventually ‘knows’ this guy only cares about tech, so tech it will be! That’s disproportionate because of my job and hobbies, but not because I would not be interested about the random, interesting stuff

I still long for the good journalistic and editorial touch, to be served somehow (today: newspaper) to me and I’m willing to pay for it.