Thursday, January 08, 2009

Take the plunge and turn off the presses

Hot off the presses after yesterday's debate over the New York Times comes a call to shout down all the printing presses and put news exclusively online.

Readers will have nowhere else to go, either, if they want to go to their old reliable source of news and information. The numbers of unique visitors to a newspaper's web site will go up dramatically, if the print version disappears. And as those numbers rise the rates charged for ads can also increase. Of course, the web also offers a definitive method for tracking metrics, too. An advertiser can see how many people have clicked on their ad and then executed the "call to action" that was promoted. There is no more precise measurement for assessing the value of an advertising dollar. Calculating the impact of a full page ad in a newspaper is a slightly more complex and imprecise process.
says James Moore over at the Huffington Post

So is this the answer for the business model question.Simply force people online.

What about people that have no or poor online access.Are they to be denied information ?

No argument says James

Instead of delaying this transition to a full digital world and seeing how long they can sustain their print versions, media companies need to plan a full stop of printing presses and turn their web sites into their solitary news products. They can execute this strategy now or they can keep feeding money and intellectual energy into the already dead carcasses of their papers until they realize, too late, the paper is rancid with decay and the readers they might have captured on their web site have already gone elsewhere. Seems a simple choice.

2 comments:

Coordinator of the Printernet Project said...

Enough already. The only people who can make money from a website are those who use it to sell stuff..Amazon, Ebay, and WalMart, etc.

And those who can give advertisers a billion page views with very low overhead and awesome metrics. Google and ??

Meanwhile, "read for free, pay for print" is the culture of the web. So..Cut the overhead. Focus on the journalism that you have real expertise. Put out customized Print versions for people who are willing to pay for it. Sell local advertising to small local business.

If newspapers go into web only, they compete with Google, et al. Not a good place to be as CPM on the web goes lower and lower and lower.

Nigel Barlow said...

I agree,

The model doesn't stack up.People have to be persuaded to pay for qulaity print journalism amd the only way to do that is to provide quality that is exclusive to the printed word.

The worst mistake that newspapers did was to start putting their content online for free.

They were listening to the techie savvs and not the money people