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By Chris Meadows

090218_PB_paidContentEX The crux of many of the “can newspapers be saved” articles we have covered in recent months is whether consumers would be willing to pay for content. In a recent article, Slate—itself a veteran of attempting to charge users for content—looks at kinds of content for which consumers might be willing to pay.

In the article, Jack Shafer writes:

Not all successful paid sites are alike, but they all share at least one of these attributes: 1) They are so amazing as to be irreplaceable. 2) They are beautifully designed and executed and extremely easy to use. 3) They are stupendously authoritative.

As examples, Shafer cites ConsumerReports.org (the web-based version of Consumer Reports magazine), the Major League Baseball pay-per-view (or -listen) website MLB.tv, and the iTunes Music Store.

Shafer suspects that the external-to-browser nature of iTunes contributes to its success, because consumers have been conditioned to think that anything contained within a web browser is supposed to be “free.” He mentions the New York Times’s Times Reader Adobe AIR application as another example of non-browser-based content that can garner fees, and the Kindle as a third.

If I were in charge of recruiting paid users, I’d ape Apple, the Times, and the Kindle to create a boutique environment in which to push content. Luckily for Slate, I don’t have that duty. The Plastic Logic platform, or something like it, is an obvious place to Kindle-ize or iTune-ize various types of online content.

Finally, he points out that it is still fairly early in the life of the Internet, and that other media (such as TV and radio) tended to take at least a couple of decades and possibly longer before payment-based models (such as cable TV) successfully emerged. Just because it has not happened yet does not mean it will never happen.

 
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