If that’s how paywalls work then we’re utterly flipping screwed

The Neanderthals at Fairfax Business media really screwed up AFR.com. Anyone reading the paper version goes to Business Spectator or The Australian these days if they want breaking news. Sadly for FBM their readership is dying out too.. So it is only a matter of time before this depreciating asset is given the chop by McCarthy & Co in favour of more gossip and trashy celebrity news.

$109 for a month’s access to afr.com.au ? Wow, that’s rich. Tim, I would be interested to know ‘how much per article’ your subscription ends up costing for the month, if you don’t mind me asking?

As a regular user of the ‘net since 1993, the only intellectual stuff I’ve paid for was Real Player in the 90’s, $10 credit at Fairfax around 2002 (I wonder if it’s still there?), and some photos from iStockphoto.

While I can see a future for paid content, I don’t see ‘loyalty’ subscriptions like the one offerred by AFR will be the model of the future.

Sure, when I was a kid, the loyalty system worked – we used to get the paper (SMH) delivered, by one newspaper delivery guy, who turned up once in the morning.

Now, people have the choice of not only their city’s daily’s, but also from just about every paper, news service and blog, from around the world, and in real time.

People may pay for news in the future, but I don’t think it will be the ‘customer loyalty’ model AFR is using. I think IF people pay for their news in the future they will choose ‘story by story’, by micro payment, for an exclusive, first to air, or produced by a professional team, depending on their preference.

I think there is going to be too much competition from Joe Blogger with his mobile phone with sensational footage, the competing media for breaking news, international sources, and niche sites like Mumbrella & Crikey for loyalty subscriptions of AFR’s magnitude to survive.

However, if the AFR model is taken up by other news organisations, then it may be good business for the up and coming news aggregators. They may end up being the majority of subscibers to the ‘loyalty model’ news services, and then deliver tailored news to their customers from all sources. Freelance broadcasting will also boom as they will be able to use the aggregators for payment by either story or ‘pay per view’.

Maybe the papers should evolve to being aggregators, and a delivery / checkout for news & entertainment? The PayTV networks Foxtel & Optus already do it now – they source channels from around the world, and then give us a choice (probably could be better) of sources of news and entertainment we want to watch.

When I left Radio in 1997, I was broadcasting by satellite to around 40 stations, and there were about that many broadcasting on the internet. However, back then, the internet was restricted to the phone line. Now there are tens of thousands of live streaming radio & tv stations, (not to mention YouTube) on the internet – which is now wireless.

Watch out radio stations as we know it – you will be going the way of the newspaper soon. FTA TV, then Pay TV will be after that. The winners will probably be the aggregators.

Farifax are struggling to keep their readers with their free product – a successful pay wall is a pipdream.

So, I heard they only had 7000 subscribers to afr.com – any bids on that?

Failfax needs sooooo much help….how can they get it soooo wrong for sooo many years? I know, let’s call some consultants…gee, great advice board, you just proved your value. Let’s give Roger Corbett another AO.

Tim, if you want to do proper research, the State Library or one at a university would be a good place to start. Even without a membership, you can usually get searchable access to a database of newspapers.

I just took a 30 second break from writing this comment to access the NewsBank archive through the UNSW Library website, and got 611 full-text results for a basic search on “Photon Group”. Searching for “Tim Hughes” + “Photon” gives nearly 200 results back to 2003.

I’m not sure what the best/cheapest online journal access would be, but I imagine you’d be paying not too much more for access to a purpose-built news database than you’ve paid to get behind AFR’s paywall.

Oops, should point out my access comes from being UNSW staff. You might check whether you qualify for alumni access at your alma mater, too.

There may be 7000 subs, but the company I work for doesn’t have to pay $109 a month to access the articles, we’re offered a years subscription for about $300 because we’re already subscribers to the paper version.

Actually, we get 5 copies of the paper, but we’re only getting one online sub, and access to it is locked-down to the Librarian only, so if you want an article, you have to ask her to get it for you. Makes for an antiquated process? Maybe. But it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.

What indeed were you thinking? I had the impression that you’d rather lunch on broken glass and plastic lettuce.

I just can’t see a future for paid general content online. For specialist press I can see it being a valuable income stream – access to years of online archives is definitely enough to make me renew my New Scientist subscription each year, for example – but specialist press have the benefit of having unique content.

Newspapers are in a situation where they are trying to reach a broad readership in an environment that involves a huge amount of competition for the same stories. The bulk of their “unique content” angle comes down to opinion pieces by their columnists, and I guess Fairfax may be banking on my someday paying human dollars to read Miranda Devine’s take on things, but I’m pretty sure someone else would be in charge of my finances if I’d suffered so serious a head injury.

Should this surprise you? Is there a single thing Fairfax has done well since Conrad Black was shown the door?

The SMH is reeling. The Age is on its death bed,. They paid far, far too much for Southern Cross. Catalano is gutting their suburban goldmine in Melbourne and will soon invade Sydney. And over at the Fin, Gill presides of an ongoing exodus of readers, key staff members and credibility.

Ever noticed the Gill & Burge idea of an Opinion page? Every day, another academic lefty arguing against the magic of the marjets. Forget politics, think audience. Think that stuff goes down real well with the investor class? Yeah, sure it does.

And when The Age dies, unless some deep-pockets redeemer turns up, expect someone at the wake to tell the amusing story of one of its most recent misadventures — you know, the way people always do when it comes time to bury a once-loved dill.

They announce four years ago that the Age wil go Berliner. Execs head off overseas to study how other papers have done. Much money is spent.

And then, then-editor jaspan gets a knock on his office door. It’s the Tulla plant manager who has come, hesitant of voice, to pass on the information that while Berliner would be a bonza way to go, the presses just cannot handle without massive re-investment.

God, but McCarthy & Co. are dopes. The Herald Sun is a ridiculous parody of what it used to be, and pretty much the entire Finance team is leaving. Bye Bye, A & B readers.

So The Age could — should — make a play for that market. Reposition itself, quit pitching only to the Green/Green Left market segment (lots of consumer dollars there).

But no. McCarthy keeps cutting and Roger Corbett seems to think he is still running a supermarket, where squeezing overheads and margins are all the game is about.

If they gave Fairfax management IQ tests, every single one of the dumb bastards would fail.

Isn’t this just a complaint about poor customer service, the kind that banks and telcos deliver as standard?
Sounds like online news is playing catching up in more ways than one.

cant wait to see what goes behind your paywall tim

Dino does have a point Tim. You did pay for something from someone you clearly despise.

This example was a little thin to describe the downfalls of paid content. Technical error? Welcome to the pain of every telco customer. People pay for products which have shitty tech support all the time. But its a necessary evil. If you want the product, tech support wont get in your way.
However, why do you want that product anyway? There is nothing on the afr.com.au site which is so unique you cant get it elsewhere for free, and with less hassles.
Subscriptions to news sites if for the mums and dads who have no idea how to research properly for themselves and want the convenience of one access point.
Which when you think about it, paid content is introducing a model into a dying market. In 10 years when everyone will have basic internet search skills (thanks to the advances in Google and internet freedom of access) paying for this service will be moot.

Oh dear, we have a winner.

SMH iPad app to be $4.50 a week. (http://www.mediaspy.org/report.....-ipad-app/)

I see no buyers of that.

Can we not say (not talking about the technical issues, that’s very frustrating yes I agree) that we’re continuing to chart unchartered waters and everyone is going to make mistakes, everyone is going to try different things to see what works and what doesn’t work?

We’ve had everything for free for so long now, but why should we continue to receive everything for free, unfortunately the free world revolves around money. We have created this monkey ourselves and now as an industry we should be supporting each other, we used to have to pay for everything I don’t see why everyone thinks that it’s okay to have everything for free.

It will take time to work things out, see what works, what doesn’t … it’s big change that’s occurring for everyone.

This is just a general statement, I’ve never worked in magazines or newspapers so I don’t have any knowledge of people, culture, etc. I just think we should be a bit more supportive (frustrating technical issues aside) of the changing dynamics and way forward.

Save yourself the $109 a month Tim, be good to see you more on our pages. 🙂

Hang on there. This looks like ranting bitch #399999 on this subject Tim. Surely Dave has a point? Certainly it has appeared that you do quite despise them and so on. And here you are whining in a quite awful way because you encountered a bug?

Surely it’s the AFR you despise Tim?

The people running AFR always seemed to have this assumption that just because News Ltd didn’t have any equivalent publication, that they had the market for business news all to themselves and could ignore whatever else was happening around them. That the content was so authoritative and exclusive, that big business would always want their access and would never ever unsubscribe.

They went with this expensive revamp of the site to convert it from HTML to Flash a couple of years ago. And now they’ve revamped it from Flash to HTML. What a waste of money.

Fairfax are just too embarrassed to reveal how many/few afr.com subs have been lured to part with their hard earned – like Tim. They’ve ploughed north of $20m into Gill’s ego trip, so even if you use today’s popular number of 7,000 subs, that’s an investment of nearly $3,000 per sub. After nearly four years (and three re-launches), that’s a very Fairfax-like return on investment. McCarthy obviously feels hamstrung about how to deal with the mess. Can’t pitch it. Can’t ditch it.

krangsquared : What species of idiot executes a news website in Flash?

This is not really very useful. In fact you guys (above) might like to ask yourselves if this sort of nonsense is not the very reason that valuable info will be in paid channels?

You could build a book on bad management based purely on the AFR’s misadventures on the web. As someone who was involved with the whole thing up to a few years ago, I can say it was always a rolling disaster.

What people don’t appreciate, though, is that’s the way they want it. (Edited by Mumbrella for legal reasons).

The strategy, such as it is, is to keep the board happy that they are doing amazing things in new media, while grimly protecting the no-growth, but still fat EBIT margins offered by the print edition. So it’s a defensive strategy. They don’t WANT to make it easy for you to find stuff online.

But if they can take a few hundred bucks off you in the meantime, they’re not complaining.

That’s the whole story.

A gold star for Mr Denmore