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blammo wrote
I suspect the Dispatch would quickly find out they are not as invaluable as they seem to think they are.
+1
Columbus Underground Messageboard » General Columbus Discussion
Dispatch Contemplates Going Pay/Subscription for Online Content
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the cruise director
German Village
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Walker
The KLD / Downtown / Gay Street
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Aaron Marshall wrote >>
Given the amount of threads started on here using the Dispatch's content, I'm curious what CU and other parasitic blogs/websites would do if they went to a pay wall...As much as I would love to claim that The Dispatch's revamping of their online business model is due to the exponential growth of CU and other news-aggregators... er... i mean... "parasitic blogs", that is hardly the case.
Bear is totally correct in his statement that this is simply a move to capture what is perceived to be "lost revenue" in the form of a growing online readership at Dispatch.com and a shrinking subscriber rate to the print edition. I'm not sure if The Dispatch makes any money from their online advertising model, but I'm willing to bet that it's much less than what they make with the traditional print advertising side.
The problem lies in the fact that the lost revenue is simply "perceived". I'm confident that the percentage of non-subscriber online readers who are willing to convert to paid subscribers once that switch is flipped is relatively low. And furthermore I'd say that the larger percentage of readers who opt not to subscribe will be a significant loss due to the changeover. I'm doubtful that the end result is going to be the desired result of the decision-makers at The Dispatch.
This goes back to the joke-conversation last week about a "premium" CU account. I believe that it's a smarter move to ask people to pay for new features rather than force people to start paying for something that they've always gotten for free to begin with.
I consider myself to be a bit of a "news hound" and I'm personally on the fence about whether or not I'd pay for Dispatch.com content. Perhaps I'd do it as a business expense / tax writeoff, but as an individual? Probably not.
But going back to the topic of "parasitic blogs" for a moment...
Pre-2009, Columbus Underground's "news" content was driven 90% by news aggregation from other news sources, and maybe 40% of that was from Dispatch.com. If you haven't been paying attention... since January 2009, once we relaunched, we changed our focus to original content and moved away from news aggregation. Maybe 20% of our news content now is news aggregation, and maybe 30% of that from the Dispatch. Would it kill us to completely drop linking to stories in the Dispatch at this point? A quick look at our front page (which contains no Dispatch links) should tell you that the answer is no.
On the flip side, I do watch our outgoing links and see what articles people are clicking on. We send a decent amount of traffic to The Dispatch as well as other sites and blogs to read their content. Would it totally kill the Dispatch for us to stop linking to them? No. But a few hundred visitors here and a few hundred visitors there, multiplied by various other local websites no longer linking to paid content articles would start to add up. I have to imagine that it's something they've already taken into consideration, and hope that the gained subscriber accounts would negate the lost non-subscriber readership.
Posted 3 years ago # -
lisathewaitress
SoHud
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Is the Dispatch parasitic because of its heavy reliance on AP stories and other syndicated content?
Posted 3 years ago # -
lisathewaitress
SoHud
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well. I just spent the last 15 minutes looking at the dispatch website. i found one interesting article about the North Market and how it is now self-sustainable and doesn't have to be supported by tax dollars anymore.
And then there were 60 comments about how the North Market is contributing to the obesity of Ohioans, how they are an evil, liberal market for elitist, limo-riding democrats, how people should shop at WalMart instead,
And, how the North Market will be razed to put in mayor coleman's train station.
And that pretty much solidified for me that I will not be paying for content for the Dispatch.
but I can't wait to see them try it!
Posted 3 years ago # -
jeff_r
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lisathewaitress wrote >>
And then there were 60 comments about how the North Market is contributing to the obesity of Ohioans, how they are an evil, liberal market for elitist, limo-riding democrats, how people should shop at WalMart instead,
And, how the North Market will be razed to put in mayor coleman's train stationIt's like some bizarre experiment to test the infinite monkey theorem. I expect that given enough time and enough comments, someone will eventually type something intelligent - even if by accident.
Posted 3 years ago # -
KSquared
Literally Hell
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lisathewaitress wrote >>
well. I just spent the last 15 minutes looking at the dispatch website. i found one interesting article about the North Market and how it is now self-sustainable and doesn't have to be supported by tax dollars anymore.
And then there were 60 comments about how the North Market is contributing to the obesity of Ohioans, how they are an evil, liberal market for elitist, limo-riding democrats, how people should shop at WalMart instead,
And, how the North Market will be razed to put in mayor coleman's train station.
And that pretty much solidified for me that I will not be paying for content for the Dispatch.
but I can't wait to see them try it!Dispatch comments make me lose faith in humanity.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Bear
The woods
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jeff_r wrote >>
lisathewaitress wrote >>
And then there were 60 comments about how the North Market is contributing to the obesity of Ohioans, how they are an evil, liberal market for elitist, limo-riding democrats, how people should shop at WalMart instead,
And, how the North Market will be razed to put in mayor coleman's train stationIt's like some bizarre experiment to test the infinite monkey theorem. I expect that given enough time and enough comments, someone will eventually type something intelligent - even if by accident.
the monkeys have to be doing it at random, is the thing.
Posted 3 years ago # -
blammo
in the shadow of the wonder of bread
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Bear wrote >>
jeff_r wrote >>
lisathewaitress wrote >>
And then there were 60 comments about how the North Market is contributing to the obesity of Ohioans, how they are an evil, liberal market for elitist, limo-riding democrats, how people should shop at WalMart instead,
And, how the North Market will be razed to put in mayor coleman's train stationIt's like some bizarre experiment to test the infinite monkey theorem. I expect that given enough time and enough comments, someone will eventually type something intelligent - even if by accident.
the monkeys have to be doing it at random, is the thing.
no kidding, that would greatly increase the odds
Posted 3 years ago # -
jeff_r
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I'm just throwing stuff out there now, but I wonder if maybe one of you programming types could develop a random cultural rage generator similar to this one used in academia.
Dispatch pundits would be able to select a topic they're unhappy about (traffic, crime, taxes, etc.) and then select the group they wanted to blame (the poor, environmentalists, women, etc.).
The generator would then fill in the rest with some ill-informed invective. Of course you'd have to program in a lot of misspellings and factual errors, but it seems at least possible.
Posted 3 years ago # -
bob.os
Columbus *not* Cbus
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lisathewaitress wrote >>
well. I just spent the last 15 minutes looking at the dispatch website. i found one interesting article about the North Market and how it is now self-sustainable and doesn't have to be supported by tax dollars anymore.
And then there were 60 comments about how the North Market is contributing to the obesity of Ohioans, how they are an evil, liberal market for elitist, limo-riding democrats, how people should shop at WalMart instead,
And, how the North Market will be razed to put in mayor coleman's train station.
And that pretty much solidified for me that I will not be paying for content for the Dispatch.
but I can't wait to see them try it!The amazing thing is that the D is threatening to charge for their "Exclusive Content" on one hand and then on the other passes their comments (and probably a portion, if not all of the associated ad revenue) to a 3rd party site.
Rather than take the opportunity to build a community that engages readers and starts valuable discussions and then nurturing and policing it so people want to come back, they have anonymous, YouTube-quality flame fests. If I worked at the D and had any brains or say, I'd have hired Walker years ago and had him build CU out.
Their downfall will be that they can't learn the basic lesson of the internet: Media is no longer a one-way street.
Posted 3 years ago # -
Brent
Columbus
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lisathewaitress wrote >>
Is the Dispatch parasitic because of its heavy reliance on AP stories and other syndicated content?The average daily Dispatch content consists of:
Original stories on OSU sports, Blue Jackets, and occasionally the Crew.
Stories on other Ohio sports originally from different newspapers.
2-3 original local news stories.
AP, UPI, Reuters wirefeeds of events that occured 2-3 days ago.
NY Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, etc stories reprinted from 1-2 days before about events that happened 1-2 days before that.All of which I read (along with commentary and interpretation) immediately after they occurred in my RSS reader.
What function does the Dispatch serve exactly?
Posted 3 years ago # -
the cruise director
German Village
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Jeff R and Brent - thank you. I needed those hearty laughs, it's been a long day. Great stuff!
Posted 3 years ago # -
lisathewaitress
SoHud
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myliftkk
Columbus, OH
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Bear wrote >>
(sigh...) Newspapers and music companies are just thinking about these issues the wrong way, it seems to me. They're thinking about how to extract money from people, instead of how to provide things that people want (and will therefore pay for).
They realized early on that the internet meant that a lot of stuff was available for low or little cost, and so they rushed to provide their content alongside it... not bad but as they're now realizing it won't pay the rent.
The Times, New Yorker, Slate, a couple of others found a way to tap my wallet when they tailored their content to my Kindle. I get their content, delivered effortlessly to an e-reader whenever they produce it... so simple and useful to me that I'm willing to set up auto-pay and cough up a pretty good fraction of their dead-tree subscription price to have them delivered. Most if not all of them are clearing more profit from me than they did pre-Kindle; the only exception may be the NYT, depending on their production costs. And I'm quite happy with that outcome.
I'm not saying that's the answer to everything, of course. But it's the sort of customer-oriented solution that's better-designed than "pay for our content or get nothing," which only works if you've genuinely managed to corner a monopoly position.The larger problem, even beyond their money extraction focus, is that the whole business model premise on which the newspaper, as a recent corporate entity, exists, has disintegrated beneath them. Newspapers grew to their current size because they had no competition (see historical media conglomerate mergers) and operated in nearly captive markets where they set the standard for ad rates (which is why they were such hot properties for mergers back in the day). Subscription rates, in general, were virtually unimportant to a newspaper's bottom line, as it always has been the ad rates that keep the corporation running at the size that it's at. That in turn subsidizes the news department, so naturally news departments simply act as corporate liability in comparision to the ad side of the business, and the lion's share of business focus is put on the ad side of the house. When my father was CIO of the Orlando Sentinel, he spent much more time in the 90s researching and buying classified and printing systems (and integrating them across the Tribune Co. papers across the states) than spending any time on media site development because that's what the corporate leaders demanded. It might seem second nature to us users, but a lot of executive newspaper leadership is from the old school ad side, not from the news side (and certainly not from the new media world), and the results show as paper after paper fails to successfully remodel their business to the current environment.
Another key knife in the newpapers current model is the explosive growth in parasitic media, not parasitic because they steal newspaper content, but parasitic because they steal their eyeballs. Everytime something like CU pops up somewhere and becomes successful, it divides the media eyeball pie into smaller a smaller slices and you (as a newpaper megacorp) can't just keep raising ad rates 10% a year to meet your corporate revenue targets when your eyeballs are fleeing your poor content because now they have what they didn't have for years, and that's a bucketful of media choices. Pay walls, pay meters, article cops, none of these things change the underlying dynamics that the corporate media model that newspapers have enjoyed/exploited for a long time is doomed to fail now that the capital costs for delivering typed content have shrunk to little more than the time it takes for me to write this post.
I don't see this as a bad thing at all. The democratization of information sources is good for society at large, even if it's going to kill off some dinosaurs in the process simply because they cannot adapt.
Posted 3 years ago # -
myliftkk
Columbus, OH
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jeff_r wrote >>
I'm just throwing stuff out there now, but I wonder if maybe one of you programming types could develop a random cultural rage generator similar to this one used in academia.
Dispatch pundits would be able to select a topic they're unhappy about (traffic, crime, taxes, etc.) and then select the group they wanted to blame (the poor, environmentalists, women, etc.).
The generator would then fill in the rest with some ill-informed invective. Of course you'd have to program in a lot of misspellings and factual errors, but it seems at least possible.ask, and you shall find: random epithet generator
Posted 3 years ago # -
turbo ninja
Formerly Crumb Bus, Oh. Now Durm, NC.
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I get the Sunday Dispatch and the big red "ONLY IN THIS NEWSPAPER" brands only served to demonstrate how little of the paper's super-special proprietary sleuthing/wordsmithing that I actually pay attention to.
So hey Ben: If that content is all I'll miss by cancelling, guess who's gonna cancel? I'll tell you the answer on my blog, but only if you register as a subscriber first.
Posted 3 years ago #
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