I love reading NYTimes online version and love the fact it is free. Every time I read it I feel like I should click on the Google Ads on its news pages. Rationally it makes no sense for me to do that, and I don’t click, because it is not enough that I click on the Ads if not many are going to. If NYTimes wants to give their content to me for free, I am only happy to consume like any other reader.
Unlike Financial Times and Wall Street Journal many online newspapers like The New York Times are free. They exclusively rely on page views to drive Ad revenues. As the Ad revenue shrinks, the free model is proving to be a bad one.
This week’s big news was the end of Rocky Mountain News, print and online version. Closely on the heels, Newsday a Long Island daily owned by Cablevision announced that they will move to pay to read model. Cablevision’s COO says he wants to:
end distribution of free Web content and make our news-gathering capabilities a service for our customers.
He is absolutely correct, the line of thinking that news has value and hence customers should be charged for this regardless of the distribution medium is slowly taking hold. If the online version of a newspaper has been free all along, can it successfully convert the readers into paying subscribers? If the newspaper can gain more incremental revenue from subscription than it receives from Ad revenue today, it is the right decision. But how can it convince readers to pay for something they always received for free?
ZDNet’s Tom Steinert-Threlkeld wrote a blog post on whether on not Newsday’s pay model is an Optimum one. He says,
It’s not like I don’t value it. I just don’t have to pay for it, on screen.
Of course the question is not whether we value are not, we all value the service we get from Newsday or NYTimes despite the $0.00 price. It is also not the question of communicating this value. Like Tom, most readers will not accept the transition from fee to free model because of their reference price frozen at $0.00. So if the NYTimes or Newsday want to charge for what used to be free they need to focus first on impriving this reference price.
To answer the question, will Newsday succeed? Without any move to improve customer reference price, they are not going to find it easy to convert customers from free to fee. Take the case from airline industry. US Airways started charging for coffee and soft drinks in their flights but after seven months they decided to rollback their unbundled pricing. My recent consumer behavior experiment shows that such a move would have been successful if they had considered improving customer’s reference price.
Reference price rule applies to valuing any service and especially with valuing free. WSJ and FT.com has it easy because they never made their online version free. For everyone else who want to move to fee model, “it is the reference price, stupid”.
Iterative Path 