Monetizing online news content

I'm always amazed at how bloggers can actually keep up with writing once or even twice a day... It's been a month since I last posted.

Let's get right to the topic du jour in the fledgling newspaper business lately - that the monetizing of online news content. Is this the white knight struggling media conglomerates are looking for? If it is, a lot of thinking needs to be done in how content it going to be developed moving forward.

Monetizing content can be a gold mine for the right media sites, but they need to keep a few things in mind before going this route:

1. Unique content - The bottom line here is that Internet users will NOT pay for information they can get elsewhere. If you can type a search string in on a news topic and 2 million sites come up with the same wire feed, you can bet the average user will go to the site that can offer it for free.

The challenge? Providing unique content within the dwindling editorial budgets of major news organizations. Editorial budgets have been slashed (including freelance budgets), increasing the reliance on wire services to provide the same copy to every one of the thousands of newspapers in North America.

No longer can you finance two or three staffers to create news analysis pieces or to chase leads that can lead to breaking stories. You have your beat reporters... a flex reporter or two if you are lucky... and that's it.

In my opinion, until newspaper publishers realize that strong newsrooms filled with quality people pay huge dividends in readership (which translates to advertising), and in brand loyalty, and who can create the unique content needed in order to monetize web content - they will get nowhere.

It's a major paradigm shift, however.

2. Development of content protection - What's the sense of having unique content on the web, if people can scrape it and put it up on their website? It's a problem - regardless of the web gadflies' plea that they are helping your brand by posting your content on their site. Nonsense. Complete nonsense.

If web users find my newspapers content on another site, you know what that means? They aren't on my site (advertisers say FAIL), and they aren't paying for the unique content through subscription (if that's possible).

This could be a contentious issue in the future and it will likely always be. See: DVDs and see: the Music Industry. 'Netters and coders will gather together to find ways to crack the latest content protection software used by newspapers and other media, just so they can get what they feel is rightfully theirs: free web content.

Still - if newspapers want to charge for content, they'd better protect it.

3. License content - This could be one way to assist in controlling the proliferation of illegally scraped material. It could also be a revenue generator for some newspapers.



I think it's going to be a challenge to launch this model successfully - especially for mainstream news publications who rely a great deal on wire feeds to provide regular web updates. Really, there is nothing wrong with having the wire stories - as long as they don't make up the majority of content on your news site.

Further, your web content must go beyond the treatment given to local topics by your competitors. Again, unique is the key. If you aren't producing material that Internet users find unique and engaging, they won't be enticed to pay for it.

Editors need to resist the urge to play a news story the same tired old way they have been doing for years. They need to challenge themselves and their news teams to think beyond the story and into the minds of readers to provide the type of content that entices them to put their hands in their pockets to pay you to create it for them.




FdS