Set the good stuff free and charge for the peas

The title of this post doesn’t make a lot of sense until you read an inter­est­ing post by Lucas Grindley, the online man­ag­ing edi­tor for NationalJournal.com. Grindley’s respond­ing to the revived idea of charg­ing for news con­tent online, an idea that’s stuck in the craw of many “infor­ma­tion wants to be free” advocates.

Grindley’s argu­ment makes a ton of sense. He says that some arti­cles should be free and oth­ers should be behind a pay­wall, avail­able only to sub­scribers. OK, when I put it like that it sounds a lit­tle less like sense and more like “com­mon sense,” as in the kind that’s not worth read­ing about, but bear with me.

Most commodity-based thinkers would prob­a­bly put the pop­u­lar stuff behind a pay­wall, right? After all, if the peo­ple want it, they should pay for it — through the nose if pos­si­ble. But Grindley’s argu­ing the oppo­site. If it looks like it’s going to be pop­u­lar, let ‘em have it. Put it on the Web for free.

Why? Grindley points out that pop­u­lar arti­cles attract a lot of eye­balls, which means a lot of ban­ner ad impres­sions. As a result, pop­u­lar arti­cles make more money from ads than they would from sub­scrip­tion rates. Grindley’s approach looks at the arti­cle itself as a com­mod­ity and tries to find the best place for it to make as much money as it can.

What about the peas? Grindley men­tions another kind of arti­cle, which he calls the “eat your peas” kind of arti­cle. This is the arti­cle that details the hap­pen­ings of a city com­mis­sion meet­ing or other bland and gen­er­ally unin­ter­est­ing hap­pen­ing. These sorts of things need to be cov­ered by news­pa­pers, but they aren’t going to be read by a lot of peo­ple — just the peo­ple with a strong inter­est in the “peas” arti­cles. Therefore, these arti­cles will make more money from sub­scrip­tions than they will from ad impressions.

Grindley writes:

...sub­scrip­tion based con­tent must be highly desir­able. My point is that sub­scrip­tion con­tent serves niche audi­ences, not large audi­ences. The mem­bers of the niche are will­ing to pay. And if you pick the right niche, then they’re will­ing to pay a lot.

Voila! A model that could work, pro­vided that edi­tors have a crys­tal ball to pre­dict the pop­u­lar­ity of an arti­cle before it’s put online. I kid. Most edi­tors and reporters would have their ears to the ground and know how pop­u­lar an arti­cle prob­a­bly would be among the read­ers, but this sort of sys­tem would require a strong busi­ness sense among at least one per­son in the newsroom.

The jour­nal­ists I know don’t have a lot of busi­ness sense, but I pre­dict that will be chang­ing soon among all reporters and editors.