Pretty much everybody who's talking seriously these days about asking users to pay for news content is pointing at the same model: Leave the website open to casual visitors, but require heavy users to sign up as paying customers. Let people see perhaps half a dozen stories a month, but if they show signs of high interest, present them with a bill for the content they're consuming.
That's the model being planned at the New York Times. It's the model that Journalism Online has described as having the most support in its talks with newspaper publishers. (I don't know what model Rupert Murdoch is planning, but then I suspect he doesn't either.)
The goal of this model is to preserve most of the site traffic that enables an advertising revenue model to work, while getting serious users to support the journalism they find valuable.
But there's a technical problem: HTTP cookies. To let casual visitors in the door while challenging regular users to pay, you have to rely on cookies, and the cookie monster won't let you do that. Cookies just aren't very reliable for that purpose.
Lots of websites require that cookies work. You can't log in to buy a book, schedule a hotel room, post a comment or check your bank balance without cookies. They generally work fine for that purpose. So where's the problem?
Those sites use what are called session cookies. When you log in, the website hands your browser a token that uniquely identifies you. If you log out, or close your browser, or reboot your computer, that token is thrown away.
This is fine for a short session, but to track how many pages you've read this month on the Daily Bugle's website, we're going to need cookies that last at least a month.
Fortunately, the cookie standard supports long-lasting cookies.
Unfortunately, human beings throw them out.
All modern browsers can be configured to accept cookies but destroy all cookies at the end of a session, or on a schedule (perhaps monthly). This takes some action on the user's part, so most people don't do it. But many do.
In fact, a Comcore study found that 38% of users cleared out their browser cookies during the month of December 2006. And 7% of uses were "serial resetters," clearing their cookie stores four or more times a month.
This has a lot of disturbing effects on your traffic measurements, but let's stay focused on the paid-content issue.
Every one of those cookie-clearing visitors is going to knock a hole in your "soft" paywall, because your paywall can't know who they are after they've flushed the cookie jar. They're going to waltz right through that hole and read whatever they want. They will never see your "please pay for access to this website" request.
And it's going to get worse. Newer browsers have "anonymous browsing" modes that make this easier, and if you expect your users not to take advantage of such tools, you're fooling yourself.
I suspect that all of this will be greeted by "well, duh" by web geeks everywhere, but unfortunately most journalists and managers have no idea how these things work, so it needs to be said. You can't have your cake (a working ad model) and eat it too (a genuinely secure paid-access model).
You have to settle for a numbers game. Can you achieve a workable, "good enough" mix of free, paid, and "should have paid but didn't" access?
As you put together a spreadsheet to analyze this, be very careful with your assumptions.
Comments
Well DUH! ;-)
Also...
It's a good point, but don't underestimate
Registration
Some responses
Anonymous is right: This is a numbers game, not a game of absolutes. If you're looking for an 85-15, you're not going to find it in an 62-38 environment. Too many people clear their cookies over the course of a month.
But you might find it workable if you narrow your time window to a week. Remember, you're not trying to build a bank. You're just trying to identify a number of people who might be good candidates to pay something. It's more like passing the collection plate at a church, but only to the people who come regularly. Tough to pull off, but maybe you learn to recognize a good number of them.
So is there a sweet spot in the numbers, and if so, what is it? Most journalists avoided math courses in college, but there are other disciplines inside newspaper companies (not just the techies) with analytic skills, and I would expect that the research people at the Times are going to be very busy over the coming months, trying to pull useful information out of the mountains of data in their server logs.
I know that analysis, testing and more analysis is a major focus of Journalism Online as well. Unlike the Times, they don't have just one shot at getting it right, so as smaller newspapers experiment you can expect to see several different pricing models and several different thresholds.
Jeff raises the issue of existing registrations. They're definitely an asset, but it's unclear how much of one.
The Times radically loosened up its registration requirements quite a while back (presumably chasing higher traffic numbers). I've had an account since the beginning, but I switch browsers and computers and operating systems a lot, so I'm typically hitting their site as an anonymous user. I haven't seen a login challenge for a long time. I would expect that its current user base includes a high number of casual users who have never registered.
In its announcement, the Times said print subscribers will not have to pay. This cuts the economic opportunity somewhat and adds a thick layer of expense -- technology to reconcile online accounts with print subscriptions, and customer service to cover for the fact that the technology (especially print circ) sucks.
At our company, we looked at tying online registration and print circulation systems several years ago, when registration was all the rage. In fact, we wrote a five-year strategic plan that said we'd do it. We did not. It's not as simple as it looks. The costs of mating up to an array of existing systems (and apparently no two are configured alike) wiped out any benefits we might imagine from a unified customer database.
Cookie Monster no like IP address space
Locks keep the honest people out
Do cookies really matter anymore?
multiple browsers
IP addresses
IP addresses fail for a couple of reasons, the big one being heavy reliance on single-address firewalls by large institutions (businesses, schools, government centers). News sites get a lot of their traffic from those sources. Even in a residential setting you're likely to have multiple users.
Facebook Connect is worth a look (we're evaluating it for completely different reasons) but it doesn't preserve the "casual visitors are unmolested" aspect of the model. Facebook does, like everyone else, rely on cookies to keep you logged in.
As I've said before it will
Jay Rosen's take
Jay Rosen points out that the Times is planning to allow free pageviews if they're referred by "another Web site." An interesting twist.
'Nuther hidey-hole for pageview count
shared objects
are another place pageview info could be kept. It still can be deleted off the file system by visitors, but at least the delete function isn't built into browsers (and you'd have to know your way around the innards of Flash).