In what appears to be a publishing first for a major trade book publisher, Random House has begun to sell online, for $2.99 each, six chapters and the epilogue of its published nonfiction book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.” The book, which was published last year, has been a steady seller and already has 220,000 hardcovers in print. The book studies the fact that some ideas have continuing currency, while others seem to disappear. The test, therefore, is an effort to determine whether popular nonfiction books can be exploited in previously untried ways. As there are many books whose individual chapters would be of special interest to certain consumers, many publishers will be interested in the results of Random House’s test.
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Book Publisher Tries Selling by Chapter
Published by February 25th, 2008 in Business Trends. 0 CommentsRupert Murdoch indicates plans to make the Wall Street Journal’s content available online for free
Published by November 21st, 2007 in Business Trends. 0 CommentsRupert Murdoch has now more clearly indicated plans to make the Wall Street Journal’s content available online for free once he takes control of the WSJ’s parent company Dow Jones. On November 12th, Murdoch told The Australian that he would eliminate the subscription fee for the WSJ site as part of a plan to boost readership from 1 million to 20 million, which he believed would produce sufficient additional advertising revenue to make up for the lost $50 million in subscription fees.
http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,23636,22748712-462,00.html
If Murdoch’s move draws the volume of advertising dollars he is predicting, this could have a significant impact on the advertising revenues of other financial news outlets, as noted by Douglas McIntyre.
http://www.247wallst.com/2007/11/murdoch-say-wal.html
A first step towards free access to WSJ online content has already been made. On November 13th the WSJ site started adding “Digg” buttons to its site, which enable Digg users to have free access to any articles that other readers submit to Digg.
One blogger has questioned whether advertisers will be willing to pay WSJ the same level of per-impression rates for the less wealthy largely college age demographics of Digg users as they are for reaching the wealthier business clientele of the subscription WSJ site. He suggests that this demographic shift could lead to advertisers preferring measurements that focus less on impressions made and more on sales generated.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/11/14/digg-this-wall-street-journal-adds-buttons
Of course this argument could also easily apply to the shift to a less wealthy demographic likely to come from dropping the subscription model overall.
Subscription-based news sites on the web abandon subscription-plus-advertising revenue models
Published by September 20th, 2007 in Business Trends. 0 CommentsThis week two of the major subscription-based news sites on the Web have advanced plans to abandon their subscription-plus-advertising revenue models in favor of advertising-only models, which would make all their content available free online. First, the New York Times announced on September 18 plans to make the formerly subscriber-only parts of its site available for free, effective September 19th. The Times had charged for access to portions of its site for two years.
Then, later on the 19th, the Wall Street Journal’s likely new owner Rubert Murdoch announced that he was leaning towards making the WSJ’s online content (almost all of which is now only available to subscribers) available free of charge.
Both Murdoch’s announcement and the NYT announcement express the belief that the growth in ad revenue due to increased readership will more than offset the lost subscription revenue, with the NYT noting that this is particularly likely given the large number of people who find NYT articles through Internet searches, rather than by starting at the NYT home page.
These announcements follow in the wake of similar decisions to stop charging for online content made by the Los Angeles Times in 2005 and Slate in the late 90s. If Murdoch follows through with his floated plan for the WSJ, it will leave the Financial Times as the only major newspaper to charge for online access to its content. While FT denies having plans to follow suit, the announcement regarding the WSJ raises the specter that increased competition from other online news providers and the user preference for free over subscription content has created a potential for increased advertising revenue that could surpass the lost subscription revenue even in the market for business and financial information. Many had thought this market was insulated from such trends due to the quantifiable monetary value that up-to-the-second financial information has to investors.
Will this trend ultimately extend to even financial sites with more of an analytic focus than a news orientation, such as Dun & Bradstreet’s Hoovers.com, or will the value of such information to investors continue to support a subscription model? And could Lexis and Westlaw be next, with the increased availability of legal materials from non-subscription sites? It could be that the reliability and comprehensiveness of such search sites, along with the ability of financial and law firms to pass those costs on to clients, will forestall such developments. Still, I think we are headed in the direction of the free model. What do you think?
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