Conspicuous consumption could save the news business
Advertisers are turning away in their droves, meaning the consumer is now the news industry’s last hope. Could the digital version of a radio car bumper sticker be exactly what the news industry needs to save itself from extinction?
It’s a dire time for the news industry. Readers are flooding to social media for content, advertisers are moving with them and costs are being cut at a brutal rate in a desperate bid to meet falling revenue.
It is increasingly clear that business models that depend on amassing large audiences in order to provide a forum for advertising will always struggle against the “niche of one” audience that social media platforms can provide for advertisers.
Instead, news media needs to draw revenue from consumers. It needs to find a way to persuade consumers to part with their cash in order to access content. As the Irish joke goes, if we are heading there we wouldn’t want to start from here.
People inside this news bubble are still missing the point, which isn’t just the elephant in the room, but the woolly mammoth in the room.
People of enough intelligence to want to subscribe to a newspaper online do NOT want to have someone watching over them as they read, profiling them by what they read, for how long and when – and on-selling it to undisclosed 3rd parties.
The subscription by credit-card only model is toxic, as it does not offer a cash or stored value card option, and therefore, privacy. That would provide the anonymity readers seek, and subscriptions will skyrocket. That in turn brings advertisers. It would also bring people into newsagencies to purchase a subscription card, the same way they do with Opal cards.
The blockheads in the decision-making process at News and Fairfax are incapable of seeing past their own lust for intrusive data collection, and as a result, they’re struggling. They’ll be circling the drain very soon unless they wake up.
Are you sure a Visa or Mastercard debit card wouldn’t work?
As to determining the proportion of society that is worried about having their every second of attention tracked, (to the extent that they will avoid that tracking), take the population of Australia and subtract the number of Facebook users. I think it’s about half (including lots of children and elderly).
“what if every time a person shared a piece of news content on social media the platform vouched for the sharer’s status as a subscriber”
That would work. Facebook’s proposed news paywall would only decrease the number of people seeing the ads on news sites’ pages. Only allowing people to follow *subscriber shared* social media links to news pages would be an interesting idea.