psmith, journalist

The new-look, paid-for Times website

The paywall debate has focused on how consumers might consume the news industry’s end product: news. “Will readers pay for news online?” “Will the industry survive this change?” “Won’t people just get it for free someplace else?”

These are the news industry’s Frequently Asked Questions right now. Even people that don’t believe in Rupert Murd och‘s pile-’em-high subscription strategy – free content activist Guardian News & Media to name one – want to know whether TheTimes.co.uk will be a success.

But paywalls do not sprout overnight, they need real planning. Just look at my old colleague Martin Stabe’s presentation at SIPA on the nuts and bolts of implementing subscriptions at Emap’s Retail Week magazine. So here are some other questions it might be worth asking.

How do you attract customers? If you build it, will they come?

Forget worrying about journalism and who’s going to fund your Baghdad bureau for just a minute and ponder this: news does not sell itself. Newspapers like The Times are learning now what digital B2B titles have known for years – that making a paid-for news product work online needs a great deal of specialised marketing, promotion, management and practical know-how.

Not many sites can boast a truly massive online audience these days and even those that do have had to betray some of their brand identity. MailOnline, now making serious in-roads into America, has moved aggressively into the kind of raunchy, clickable celebs-showing-skin content that you’d associate with red-top tabloid rags and trashy women’s mags, for example.

MailOnline drank some SEO kool aid many years ago and now has search engine prescence down to something of an art (it even puts job ads in its Robots.txt file – if you don’t know what that is, working for the Mail isn’t for you).

So how do you promote and sell something that isn’t on Google? Rupert Murdoch has taken Google’s long-offered advice and disallowed search engine spiders from indexing TheTimes.co.uk; there’s not even a First Click Free, try-before-you-buy option or a metered FT.com-style model. As The Times’s assistant editor Tom Whitwell puts it, it really is “all or nothing.”

FT.com has cleverly used PR and marketing to paint itself as a pioneer in this area and has launched a suite of services to match every customer’s needs. For consumer brands like TheTimes.co.uk, the answer may lie in partnerships with other brands, hence the long-running speculation that some sort of tie-in with News International‘s sister company BSkyB may be around the corner.

Offer a good enough level of service to quickly and easily sell them things

It sounds easy but it’s not. It has to be so simple for customers to hand over cash and become subscribers – on a long or short-term basis – and there are so many variables to consider. Do all users get all content, or are there tiers? What do you do with those contact details?

On a very simple level, how the hell do you build a paywall? Go to a mercenary agency and pay young-looking people in t-shirts a day rate to build you one? Or go to a CMS vendor that promises a unicorn-like “holistic solution”?

It’s tricky stuff. A recent example: I’m a long term registered FT.com reader, so I can read up to five articles a month (I read about 100 month using First Click Free, but don’t tell them that).

But I decided to take advantage of a print and online 30-day trial for £1. I signed up, no problems – until I went to log in on FT.com. On the new comprehensive sign-up page (note: I’ve already registered for this site, they already have my details and after this they will have two sets of identical data, but there you go) it wouldn’t accept my existing password. A small note read: “We recommend you change your password for security reasons.”

I did and now I happily log in each day; the site’s staff were helpful, the problem was solved and the trial illustrates what a superb product the FT is off and online. But how many people teetering on the edge of signing up would have lost patience at that point?

Renew subscriptions and upsell customers to more products

“You don’t make money on subscriptions, you make money on renewals.” That’s the mantra of more than one B2B exec I’ve spoke to when it comes to subscriptions.

What that means is: new users are just part of the general month-to-month churn. The value for subscription based companies is when users renew their subs deal and cement their relationship. As BSkyB will tell you, the longer a customer has a relationship with a brand, the more chance he or she will buy other things too. For news organisations could be conference and award show tickets and online data subscriptions; for Sky it’s broadband, HD TV, Xbox carriage and mobile TV.

The question for sites like TheTimes.co.uk – and I’m sure the team behind it is thinking about this – what incentives are there to remain a subscriber for a year and what additional products can be sold?

Ken “Newsonomics” Doctor also pick up on this “news as retail business” theme in a good post recently and he quotes the FT’s Rob Grimshaw who told him:

Where we’ve found inspiration is Internet retail, not publishing… We’re becoming a direct Internet retailer and we have to have expertise to do that. When you do that with publishing, it looks like a different business.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Pay Per View – How Will They Handle First Click Free? (andybeard.eu)
• Rupert Murdoch still likes iPad, paywall; more evidence permissive paywalls work better (teleread.com)
• FT ceo Ridding on why paywalls are commercially and morally necessary (guardian.co.uk)
• The Financial Times launches press cuttings service on FT.com (prweek.com)
• Murdoch titles charge for online news (guardian.co.uk)