Our move to paid content

I have written a few posts in the past year or so on the state of journalism in the wake of the recession and burgeoning free digital content. There was plenty of navel gazing and head scratching that has gone on and continues in the trade (I currently have 106 bookmarks on my delicious account in the past nine months or so on this) as to whether we can come up with a different business model for online journalism. Which is code for charging for content.

So what’s my company concluded? Two main things:

• That we will be charging for content online. As of today Building has introduced a gate on its site – see this page on it its site for how the system works and Building editor Denise Chevin’s leader (it’s three quarters of the way down the page) in today’s magazine edition. Fully free is not sustainable for us as a business. The journalism and the technology to broadcast our digital content model (news, analysis, data, community) requires significant investment. This has to be reflected in how we structure our sites to reflect both this investment and the commitment of our current print subscribers (who pay for content in print when all of it has been available for free up to now online). As digital guru Jaron Lanier put it in an interview with the Observer last Sunday there are limitations to the free model: “having everything freely accessible to everyone else actually just creates a mediocre mush”.
• Crucial for me is our approach to this move. So far in the switch we have tried to be iterative: to test approaches before making significant steps. The gating system we are using is based on the FT-model, where users first register after some use then pay after further clicks. As the buzzword goes it’s a freemium model.  We first introduced registration some months ago on Building and then have followed with the paid for gate today. The system itself is not exactly as we want it now but as part of a more significant investment in our web content management system we will be able to improve it significantly in the next few months.

We’re not under any illusions about this as a challenge. It has involved a significant mindset change for us as a team. Not least for me, who has been throwing out free online content for fun for the past three and a bit years. We’re trying to be realistic in our expectations for the move and hope that our audiences will appreciate the reasoning behind this. The move will allow us to both continue offering the content we do provide but then to progressively add and evolve our digital offering.

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