Maybe it's just me, but I sometimes wonder why web advertising isn't better at supporting services. Print advertising is really lame. It just sits there on the page - no way to interact, no way for it to have animation or video, no way for it to be targeted toward the user's preferences. And yet those dumb ads have done well. Heck, web ads give the user an instant way to click through and act on the ad! Is it just that marketing people are slow on the uptake? Maybe (since there are no metrics) they believe that print ads are more effective than they are.
The problem with charging for news is that people on the web aren't going to be single source like they would with newspapers. It's unlikely that someone is going to say "I'm content with only one news website" and get a subscription to that single site. Rather, they want to pick and choose the articles they like from many sites. And so subscription pricing doesn't really work because if you charge $5/mo, news might be worth that to me, but I'm not going to pay that multiple times to multiple sites that I want to pick and choose from.
And if you decide to charge per article, well, how am I supposed to know if an article is any good before reading it? And once I've read it, I won't want to pay for it because I already have the information. That contrasts to a song heard on the radio that I might want to listen to many times.
And the web makes it easy for anyone to publish and to a wide audience. I doubt that you're going to get all your competitors to charge alongside you.
I think that the big issue is probably that radio/tv/print ads have been overestimated in their effectiveness or that marketing people don't understand the effectiveness of web ads. With metrics on how many clicks an ad got, one could simply surmise that only that number of people were affected by the ad. But those other ads effectively have a click rate of 0 since clicking isn't possible and yet it's assumed that they're effective. And with that miscalculation, they're only willing to pay small amounts for the ads.
"Heck, web ads give the user an instant way to click through and act on the ad"
And that is the problem. Because the ads in print just sit there, the only way to measure the effectiveness is in increase in sales. On the web however, the sales are web sales and the advertiser forgets completely that a customer might have seen the ad and decided to go to the shop instead. So it's advantage is its downfall aswell since it constrains the metric used to measure hence undervaluing the effectiveness of web advertising.
The problem with charging for news is that people on the web aren't going to be single source like they would with newspapers. It's unlikely that someone is going to say "I'm content with only one news website" and get a subscription to that single site. Rather, they want to pick and choose the articles they like from many sites. And so subscription pricing doesn't really work because if you charge $5/mo, news might be worth that to me, but I'm not going to pay that multiple times to multiple sites that I want to pick and choose from.
And if you decide to charge per article, well, how am I supposed to know if an article is any good before reading it? And once I've read it, I won't want to pay for it because I already have the information. That contrasts to a song heard on the radio that I might want to listen to many times.
And the web makes it easy for anyone to publish and to a wide audience. I doubt that you're going to get all your competitors to charge alongside you.
I think that the big issue is probably that radio/tv/print ads have been overestimated in their effectiveness or that marketing people don't understand the effectiveness of web ads. With metrics on how many clicks an ad got, one could simply surmise that only that number of people were affected by the ad. But those other ads effectively have a click rate of 0 since clicking isn't possible and yet it's assumed that they're effective. And with that miscalculation, they're only willing to pay small amounts for the ads.