How you should pay for newspapers in the 21st century

[andrewducker]

I saw yesterday that Google had announced a News Initiative, to make it easier for people to support newspapers. And that they were working with numerous newspapers in partnership to manage this.

Great, I thought, finally someone is going to drag newspaper funding into the 21st century.

But no. They're making it easier for you to sign up to individual newspapers online, using your Google login.

The problem being that I don't want to read individual newspapers. There are pretty much no newspapers where I read enough of them to justify subscriptions. But there are dozens of newspapers where I read an article or two per month, and probably over a hundred over the course of a year, and paying for that number of subscriptions for the occasional article makes no sense.

The solution I want is to pay a standard amount per month which gives me access to _all_ of the newspapers* - and then divides up the subscription between the different newspapers based on how many articles I read from each one. A Spotify for newspapers, if you like.

I'd be fine with this having limits. If I'm reading 20 articles per day from The Guardian then fair enough, tell me I need to upgrade my subscription to cover that. Access to the deep archives might be an add-on. But in general, take £20/month** out of my account, give me access to all of the papers, ad-free, and make sure they all get their fair share.

(With thanks to Mike Scott, who pointed out this obvious solution a fair while ago. It's been going round in my head since then.)

*And I mean all. There are some which I don't want to read, and some that frankly I'd rather didn't exist, but generally I'd be in favour of this approach including all of them. Obviously newspapers who didn't want to take part in this wouldn't be forced into it. But I'd hope that once it started to snowball it would be an obvious win.
**£20/month is a finger-in-the-air number. I'd be happy to pay more than that. Looking at various newspapers it looks like £2-£3/week is what most charge for access (although The Times is £6/week).

Comments

[mountainkiss]

To you both then: would you still want it if it could only be workable if the money were split in pre-determined ways (e.g., according to terrestrial readership as a marker of scale, or similar)?

[miss_s_b]

As long as the readership were being dynamically tracked, yes.

[mountainkiss]

Thank you.

[jordanpower]

I just came upon this thread and this discussion you guys are having. It's awesome because I have it every day. :)

I work for PressReader (disclaimer) and we ARE the tech that can do this. We have more than 7,000 publisher partners and we track how much people read their stuff on our platform and pay them a royalty accordingly.

It's basically...as OP said, Spotify for news.

[miss_s_b]

That's ace! But are all newspapers signed up to it?

[jordanpower]

Every newspaper in every country ever? No. Not yet :)

BUT, we're literally adding dozens every week. Sometimes more.

It started slow, getting to the first hundred was tough. Then it snowballed to 1000. Now we went from 6,000 to 7,000 in a few months. Because the papers are seeing the benefit of getting in front of readers from all over the world.

[miss_s_b]

I might give it a prod.

[miss_s_b]

Hmm. When I click on UK the first thing it gives me in big full colour is The Daily Mail. There ARE people who don't object to the Daily Mail... But there are a lot who do. Maybe the Indy or the Torygraph might be less offputting? Some free market advice for you there.

Yeah, unless I can easily STOP it from showing me stuff from hate-filled rags like the Mail, the Express, The Star... I'm not going to give you money, sorry. I do not want to risk accidentally clicking on them and giving them even a fraction of a penny.

[jordanpower]

That's fair. Thanks for the advice. (One of the main reasons I like to come onto chats like these). It's something we're definitely working on. How do you create a platform with everything, when newspapers (unlike movies or music) often have strong, real, emotional connections to readers - good and bad.

[andrewducker]

I can't see any reason why that would be the case. And if they tried to pull that kind of thing I'd assume cheating.

Every website can tell which pages have been looked at, and if you're logged in (which you'd need to be, in this case), exactly what you've looked at. So dividing up money by access should be trivial.

(Same as with Spotify)

[mountainkiss]

That might be so but does not answer my question. (Perhaps regard workable as "newspapers would consent" rather than "technologically workable"?)

[andrewducker]

Ah. Maybe, in order to get them on board.

But paying them more for being read less would probably be unsustainable.

[mountainkiss]

Sorry, I'm not following.

[andrewducker]

If, say, the Guardian signs up on the grounds that it will get 5% of all money, because it sells that percentage of total newspapers, but actually only 1% of page views are to the Guardian then that probably isn't a sustainable situation.

(That make sense?)

[mountainkiss]

It doesn't quite. Am so sorry. What makes that unsustainable?

[andrewducker]

In the long run I'd expect that other partners would feel short-changed, and it would be a raised cost on the whole organisation which would not be worth it in the long run.

If a member of the group is extracting payment higher than the value they're adding then I'd generally see that as something which would self rectify (so long as things were transparent)

[mountainkiss]

Thanks.