New metrics and business models for digital publishing - selling outcomes not inputs? Are publishers using outdated metrics? How should they be innovating and reinventing their business models? Understandably there has been much debate of late around publishing business models. The rise of the internet, compounded by the global economic woes, are making it increasingly hard to see where the money is in publishing and media going forwards. You can take your choice of predictions as to what will happen with online advertising spend this year. Metrics, as units, or levers, for callibtrating value and performance, are clearly important to any discussion of business models.
Should we make the most of the array of new metrics that interactive media afford us? Data, data everywhere... The metrics challenge has been furthered mired by the repeated, but doomed, attempts thus far to establish a 'single currency' against which online media can be planned and bought. There are two obvious high level metrics which should be relatively easy to understand, and buy, for an advertiser. What are we to make of The Times paywall figures? Yesterday News International announced that “the new digital products for The Times and The Sunday Times have achieved more than 105,000 paid-for customer sales to date.
" So are these figures good or not? Should other media companies be encouraged by these initial results from Rupert’s great experiment? I’ve frequently been on record in the past, including on Channel 4 News, saying that I didn’t think Murdoch’s paywall plans were the right way forwards. So should I now be eating humble pie, given that the data and results are now public? The Facts & Figures A quick round up of some of the key facts and figures: The paywall charge is £1 for a day's access and £2 for a week's subscription to the Times’ sites. So are these figures any good or not? The key point at this stage is that the figures themselves are a) early and b) shrouded in uncertainty. We don’t know yet what the subscriber split is across, say, the website vs. the iPad app. So I’d say my guestimates weren’t a million miles off.
Nick Denton, Gawker Media, and journalism’s future. For years after starting Gawker Media, the online publishing network, in 2002, Nick Denton ran the company out of his apartment, in SoHo. “He said, ‘If you run it out of your house, then no one expects anything,’ ” Denton’s friend Fredrik Carlström, the film producer and adman, told me. “ ‘If you have an office, people want stuff. They want cell phones, lunch breaks, beer on Fridays.’ ” Gawker Media was a deliberately fly-by-night operation: incorporated in Budapest, where a small team of programmers still works, and relying on elegantly jaded bloggers who considered themselves outsiders with nothing to lose.
Early contributors tell stories about bounced checks, and receiving payment straight from the A.T.M. The arrangement, many assumed, was a convenient hedge against potential libel claims. (Scarcely a week passes without one or more of Denton’s nine sites receiving a cease-and-desist letter.) “You missed all the excitement,” Denton said, bounding over to greet me.