Murdoch’s challenge: the view from Sweden

Traditional media is dying, and journalists and bloggers worldwide are debating what it needs to do to survive. Rupert Murdoch declared earlier this year that his news organizations will start charging for content before the end of 2009. Although it’s been over a month since, the debate rages on in Sweden.

 At the risk of oversimplifying, most bloggers have said: “It can’t be done.” However, I do think it’s possible to charge for content, but a number of challenges need to be recognised:

First of all, you can’t protect news. This has always been true, but what used to take hours can now take a matter of minutes. So any news business model needs to address the issue of charging for stuff that’s already there.

Secondly, subscription is dead. Social media allows us to link between several different sites, blogs and social networks. No single site can possibly recreate that.

So how do you charge for something that is essentially free? Especially when you contribute only a small part of what the readers perceive as the value? Well, you can if you add value and deliver it faster than the sites that offer it free of charge.

The key is to realise that while your competitors may offer the same story as you free of charge, switching to them isn’t quite free for the reader. They will have to find that other site and locate the same story, and depending on whether they read on a computer or a mobile device, this will usually take anything from 15 seconds to a couple of minutes.

If you can provide analysis or comments the reader values, and the time it takes to pay is less than or equal to the time it takes for them to go somewhere else, they’ll be willing to pay.

But it requires the payment system to be very fast, and very easy to use. It also needs to work over many different sites, because nobody is going to want to handle 20 odd log ins.

My tip – take a cue from the telecoms industry. They have operated profitably for years, tracking and charging for services that cost fractions of dollars.