A well-read colleague shared an interesting article about the change in Information, Media and Entertainment (IME as it is popularly called) landscape from the Economist: News Adventures.
It triggered a series of thoughts as the article's highlights got entangled in the strands of other interesting things I had read, of late, in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), as well as, digital content monetization. The result was this blog. I could very well be wrong, but it was worth shaking my gray cells up to articulate it in words, and in a writer's own way, thinking out loud.
Advertising would definitely dwindle as print versions fall in the publishing industry. As advertising turns online, the advertising expenses are also driven more by clicks and conversions rather than just the impressions and bought ad space. Per my understanding, New York Times (NYT) might just have found a balanced solution. If they had hidden all their articles behind the paywall, I believe search engines would not be able to crawl and rank their pages at all. This would definitely have impacted the (digital) footfalls on their website when readers searched for a news piece. If, on other hand, they had asked readers to pay for detailed versions of all articles while showing only a summary for free, it would definitely annoy readers, while still being able to feed search engine crawlers to a major extent. Apparently, NYT made a very conscious decision to allow the reader to access a certain number of articles for free, while necessitating payment for more. This ensures 2 things: One, SEO and Social Media Optimization (SMO), and two, stickiness for readers and the potential for creating loyalists.
It's interesting to observe how the competitors would react to NYT's pricing. My sister is a paper subscriber to NYT, and also gets free access to the digital version (as a part of the bundle). Whereas, I have to pay nothing in Washington DC to read the Washington Post on my phone, despite not being a paper subscriber. I wouldn't mind paying for the digital version, but no body is cashing on my willingness to purchase. And then there's the third kind - the news aggregators, like my favorite Flipboard, which conveniently aggregate news from several credible journals and news publishers, bucket it and bring it to your smartphone at the touch of a finger (all for free, did I mention!). It's definitely fun to be a party to this evolution, and I'm sure it'd be more fun reminiscing it all and telling the next generation how we used to read paper-version of news circulations as they would listen to it as an ancient anecdote with their jaws dropping with disbelief at the apparent degree of backwardness we are witnessing today.
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