Businessinsider.com is a publication I check out several times a day since it usually publishes 100+ articles on every topic from Tech to Sports.
BusinessInsider.com is starting BI Intelligence a paid subscription service that will require a membership to view certain articles.
In the case of BI Intelligence cost range from $199 a month (intro Price) all the way up to $3,999 (intro Price) which will wind up being $499 a month and $4,999 a year once the intro pricing ends.
In the domain name space both Domainincite.com and DotNxt.com both a have paid section
Domainincite.com has Domain Incite Pro, which costs $799 a year, Dotnxt.com paid section requires that you become a member.
So we would ask is this the future of blogging?
Other than advertisers blogging is a lot of work with minimal returns. Many bloggers incur a lot of travel expenditures attending conference like ICANN to report stories, that alone is going to force more and more bloggers to go to some to some sort of pay for info.
Selling access to exclusive content, something that was pretty untenable years ago looks like it maybe more the norm in the next couple of years
Maybe I’m off the wall but I still don’t get why newspapers and really everybody gives google all their hard work for free. It just perpetuates the problem. Google wouldn’t work too well if it had to pay for all the content everybody is generating. There has at least got to be a happy medium.
Great idea-motives the readers to create their own websites thus needing domains
Nothing is free even the air we breathe.
For the razor-sharpest of cutting edge original business research in lucrative fields that demand such a product, yes, but they already have those.
For 99.999% of “blogs”?
No chance. It will fail.
People have been seeking the mythical ‘middle ground’ monetization model since old media finally realized that they were dead, sometime in the middle 00’s. The graveyard of failed content ventures is overflowig with the dead, rotting corpses of free-to-pay shifts who just couldn’t accept the fact that if they would charge .50 cents, someone was willing to do it for a quarter.
Whoever comes up with the answer- whoever can develop the standardized for-pay content system that automatically bills .10 cents or .25 cents per read, or $1.99 per issue, or whatever the price may be, is a billionaire. As long as it’s done piecemeal and requires physically opening a wallet and getting out a credit card, well, that’s the Mt. Everest of eCommerce.
Really, what we need to start accepting is that 21st information delivery may not require the old modes of compilation and research. Sadly, this also means that the old journalistic ethics and quality standards go right out the window with it, but we’ll just have to accept that ‘quality’ in reporting vanished, just like ‘quality’ in consumer products, when the public demanded their toaster ovens and screwdrivers cost less than a lunch for two.
If people charge for content it will lead to new publishers coming along and offering free content and attempting to profit from ads or other revenue streams. Free content will drive the most traffic to a site. Get your CPM up and you can profit nicely.
I read a half dozen or so blogs daily, Business Insider being one of them. It’s format of providing info “bites” that summarize news and articles with links to the full articles is a great concept for those that want to get the gist or summary of something without having to wade through an entire article. Just this morning I registered a domain, based on information from one of their articles. It’s a great source, one I will miss (partially) if they go to a paid format.
Huh. That is not the way I had been thinking things would go..
With sites like http://www.newscoverage.ca who will share their adsense earnings with you – for all articles that you submit; it would seem strange that similar sites would ‘charge’ their viewers. That must mean good things for the authors, I suppose?
oh know ive been found out
this is and will be a strong model, as perfected by the first monetized blog and still the innovator we all follow
…………..
thestreet.com by jim cramer
taught me what a blog was
and recurring revenue kept them up during the dotcom bomb
my blog was always going to be paid, guess i better get going soon
I like seeing where people get their news from, you should do a whole thread on just that. There is such a glut of sites out there to choose from, but I would guess most (like myself) are creatures of habit and go to the same sites daily. I think what makes Business Insider successful, as with the Huffington Post, is the mix of part world news, tech info, political commentary mixed in with a healthy dose of scandalous affairs and irreverent gossip. I think in Yiddish they would refer to it as kibitzing.
Interesting topic for discussion, Dean. I pretty much get all my news from Egotastic.com. If that site ever went behind a paywall, I would deplete my entire savings if necessary.
Egotastic! yet another cool site I have never looked at. I can see how it could be informative and.. visually stimulating at the same time. Funny, when I look for something “visually stimulating” these days, it tends to be the Home Decor section on Pinterest.com 🙂
Michael,
This is a very thought provoking question. I would want to respond to this in a much longer article on the blog, but for now, I’ll say that we are witnessing a drastic change in the way we consume content. Because of the paywalls in mainstream sites like NYT, people are becoming a little more comfortable actually paying for content.
Truth be told, though, BI is selling research – something GigaOm has done for a very long time.