We may be about to find out. Conde Nast, the owner of Vogue and Vanity Faire among other titles, announced that they were going to change their on-line business model from an ad-supported one to one where the bulk of revenue will come from directly charging users for access to content. Coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally) the social networking news site Reddit.com (owned by Conde Nast) announced a new “Reddit Gold” premium service this month. Despite the indignant outcries from longtime users, Reddit had managed to collect a few thousand subscriptions ($3.99/month or $29.99/year) in the first few days after the program was announced. Curiously enough, the justification for the fee wasn’t for access to the content, but a promise to use the funds collected to improve the Reddit.com infrastructure.
Apparently charging directly for social networking content is problematic. Consider the following: In a survey published in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism's 2010 Digital Future Study, a whopping 0% of those polled would pay to use Twitter. Nobody. No one. Nada. Now granted, there’s a margin of error in any survey, but statistically predicting that no one would pay to use Twitter is an incredible measure of the worth users perceive for the pleasure of accessing other people’s online content 140 characters at a time. Other efforts to charge for formerly free content haven’t fared so well either. In the UK, less than 3 weeks after The Times announced a members-only strategy and erected a paywall around their site, online traffic had dropped by 90%.
Steward Brand is famously quoted for saying “information wants to be free” (although that’s not entirely what he said). It certainly appears that way for social networking at least. Charging people to participate is a monetization model with some serious challenges.
No comments:
Post a Comment