Yes, some people will pay you for your news — a really, really small number of people. Hal Varian: the economics of the newspaper business. 26 September 2013 The text below is that of the speech given by Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, on 25 September 2013 in Milan at the awards ceremony of the annual Italian journalism award È giornalismo. Hal Varian is the 2013 award winner but declined the prize money and asked the award jury to nominate innovative Italian journalists working in online media to receive the prize money instead.
The jury chose Anna Masera, social media editor of the Italian daily La Stampa, and Arianna Ciccone who in the words of the jury "has distinguished herself by her passion for journalism in founding both the International Journalism Festival, which has become a go-to annual event for journalists from all over the world, and the collective blog Valigia Blu on the changing world of journalism". Anna and Arianna shared the prize fund of €15,000.
The International Journalism Festival would like to thank both Hal Varian for his generosity and the jury for the recognition given to Arianna Ciccone. What I learned at paidContent Live: No one has all the answers on the future of media, and that’s good. When we started to put together the paidContent Live conference, which we held in New York last week, one of the driving forces behind our selection of speakers was to find those who are doing interesting things — either in new or traditional media — so that we could try and figure out what the future of media is going to look like. As I said during my opening remarks, we may not have all (or any) of the answers, but we do have plenty of interesting questions, and that is a start. Among those questions are the following: Are people going to pay directly for content? Is native advertising going to subsidize media?
Does sponsored content raise ethical issues for media companies? Are individual creators going to succeed by connecting directly with their audiences or by striking deals with existing media entities? And as far as I can tell, the answer to all of these questions is the same: Yes. And no. You have to try everything The future isn’t going to be one model. The monetization dilemma for media: Paywalls on one side, advertising on the other. In its recent analysis of the state of the media industry, the Pew Center noted how large numbers of newspaper publishers had put up paywalls or subscription barriers around their content — a group that will soon include one prominent former holdout, the Washington Post, which announced that it is launching a paywall this year.
At the same time, the report also described how many publishers are experimenting with new forms of advertising such as sponsored content and “native” advertising. The driving force behind both of these phenomena should be fairly obvious: the media industry is desperate to find new sources of revenue. That the Washington Post has finally seen fit to erect a paywall — albeit a very leaky one, as my colleague Jeff Roberts has pointed out — makes this point better than almost any other, since the newspaper’s chairman and CEO Don Graham has been vocal in the past about his opposition to such an idea, and so has the paper’s publisher, his niece Katharine Weymouth.
Services en ligne payants : les segments qui marchent. Le "New York Times" restreint l'accès partiellement gratuit de son site Web. Un an après le lancement d'un modèle économique hybride sur son site Internet, le "New York Times" se satisfait du succès rencontré. Le grand quotidien new-yorkais va pourtant en durcir les règles. A compter du 1er avril, le nombre d'articles consultables gratuitement va ainsi être ramené à dix. Il était jusqu'à maintenant fixé à 20.
Au-delà de cette limite, les lecteurs les plus assidus doivent souscrire un abonnement mensuel allant de 15 à 35 dollars. Ils sont désormais 454.000 abonnés numériques. Un chiffre qui ne cesse de progresser : fin 2011, ils n'étaient que 390.000. "Aujourd'hui, près d'un demi-million de personnes paient pour accéder à nos contenus numériques", se félicite le patron du groupe, Arthur Sulzberger. Une question de survie Dans le sillage du "New York Times", de nombreux journaux ont opté pour la mise en place d'un accès payant ("paywall") sur leur site Internet.
Une édition papier seulement le dimanche ? Mais le succès des "paywalls" est encore incertain. Les ralentissements de sites coûtent vite très chers. Une infographie illustre l'impact que peut avoir la rapidité des sites Web et mobiles sur les comportements de navigation et les ventes en ligne. Le site OnlineGraduatePrograms.com s'est penché sur l'impact de la rapidité des sites Internet sur les comportements de navigation. Par exemple, augmenter le temps de réponse de Google de 4 dixièmes de secondes réduit de 8 millions le nombre de requêtes formulées chaque jour, qui atteint en moyenne de 3 milliards. Et ce principe s'étend bien entendu aussi aux ventes.
Côté Amazon, dont le chiffre d'affaires quotidien s'élève à 67 millions de dollars, une seconde de délai coûterait potentiellement à l'e-commerçant 1,6 milliard de dollars par an. Bonnes feuilles : Le Web, ça rapporte ! Services en ligne payants : les segments qui marchent. Quel business model pour la presse en ligne ?