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Weed Feed: How Models for Success in
Premium Content are Blending Old and New Concepts |
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19 July 2004 |
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With many sources of content revenue at a crossroads some
content providers are putting the brakes on free access and
throwing up registration or purchase barriers to usage -
even when these methods seem to be out of step with how
people are using and distributing content. As evidenced by
Weed,
a rights-management scheme that helps to monetize music
content with the cooperation of individuals, there's a lot
of room for blending in old models of usage with new
technology capabilities without alienating new audiences
eager to access quality content. You need not give up
established channels to go to blending - just think
creatively about how people really use content today. |
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Free or fee,
pay-per-view or subscription, unrestricted access or
registration-only access - the world of content has been awash
in either-or models that have served as lightning rods for a
wide range of debates as to how to make money on content in
today's Web-driven marketplace. There's usually a win-win
scenario in the cards if these models are combined carefully:
free access for some content, registration or fee-based access
for other kinds, base fees or controls for some content and
pay-per-view for specific content items, and so on. No one
model is right for all audiences in all circumstances; given
the flexibility with which today's content management systems
and user software can serve up the same content to different
audiences in different venues, it only makes sense to consider
offering up a variety of approaches to content monetization.
Many publishers in the professional content arena are
beginning to offer these flexible models as well: Factiva and
LexisNexis both offer purchasing capabilities designed to suit
individuals and small businesses, Ovid's offering up ads behind
the firewall for some journals while many institutional
accounts are beginning to pressure their content suppliers to
come up with "on demand" purchasing models that meet their
needs more effectively.
Sometimes, though, the manner in which
new payment or access models are introduced is less than
elegant or foresightful. The recent rash of chain-owned
newspaper Web sites throwing up registration requirements for
all content access via search engines is one unfortunate
example. When cruising for headlines on the Web I find myself
registering numerous times for content from papers that are all
owned by the same parent organization. Apparently these folks
haven't yet realized that people are looking for a little less
confrontational arrangements to access content outside of
subscription aggregation services - arrangements that can only
help their advertising base. Wherever people hold on to
revenues from older business models there is the temptation to
institute multiple models with controls designed more to
protect old revenue sources than to position new sources
effectively. The results are usually poor in the long run for
new models as a result, opening doors to new competitive
pressures.
It helps to have little to lose when
trying out new blended models, as evidenced by the rise of
Weed, a
rights-management scheme for file sharing developed by
Shared Media Licensing that combines radio, purchasing and
reselling models for music downloads. Download a Weed file and
you can play it for free in Windows Media Player or other
players up to three times, at which time you can purchase it.
You can share the file with others and if they choose to
purchase it the sharer gets a cut of the action - and again if
the repurchaser decides to onpass it. The artist or commercial
distributor providing the song always gets half of the sale.
Weed is becoming well-known in the independent music producer's
world and is trying to expand beyond little-known indies with a
recent
announcement of a new Weed-exclusive track from Heart, a
former big-label rock act that was hot in the 1980s.
This blending of infectious distribution
with rights management that rewards redistribution is the kind
of distribution model that's likely to play well in many areas
of the content industry, most of which are only now beginning
to wake up to the inherent power of individuals and
institutions as both content consumers and recommenders. Here
are a few ideas as to how blended models may benefit text and
data forms of content in professional and personal use:
- Amplifying the value of a lending
library model. The eBooks industry is making significant
progress this year in getting electronic rights-protected
lending texts into the marketplace, but the potential for
this form of distribution is a clearly underutilized and
underleveraged form of file sharing. Clearer and simpler ways
to enable purchasing, reselling and "jumping queue" for both
books and other forms of text-oriented media within the
traditional lending model are areas ripe for exploration.
- Thinking more intelligently about
news access. Very few are going to have the patience to
register for thousands of newspaper sites from which they may
use only an article or two at most. Better to have an
across-the-board access consortium that allows free usage up
to a point on a visitor and "email to a friend" basis and
then blends in rights-protected access that will allow
draw-down from a common account. It will take an annuity-like
structure of this nature to un-addict major papers from
aggregator revenues (see our earlier
weblog on insights into New York Times revenues from
LexisNexis) and to play sensibly in the search engine-driven
marketplace for news on the open Web and in enterprises.
- Moving towards new revenue streams
in aggregation. In an era that increasingly demands both
just-in-time content acquisition and less overhead from
publishing companies who are no longer exclusive agents for
high-quality content it may pay for aggregators and major
publishers to consider how redistribution within and through
corporations could be made a more profitable line of
business. With more workflow-oriented content tools there's
an increased opportunity to price according to context of
usage instead of by the user, so that there's more
opportunity to define how content use and distribution can be
defined within a given software package. Licensing by
software type would in effect turn software providers and
users into much more direct distribution partners - and open
the door to some more effective blends between subscription
models and by-the-drink usage.
It's great that there are so many different potential models
for selling content in play, but unfortunate that so few of
them are being tried out by the people who have the most to
gain from being in on the changes - namely, the content
providers. The everyday technology in people's hands has far
outstripped the ability of most publishers and aggregators to
think flexibly about how to leverage the new blends of usage
that the technology affords. Here's to hoping that they put on
their thinking caps and help new ideas for content
commercialization to spread like - well, like weeds.
-
John Blossom
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