mark Cuban, the colorful owner of Dallas Mavericks and a media entrepreneur, has a rambling post advising Rupert Murdoch on how they can charge for content.
Rupert , you didn’t ask my opinion on this, but since when has that ever stopped me.
First the good news. You can sell content on the internet. People pay for content on and off the internet every second of every day. It’s easy to do. If you do it right. But before I get to the how to, let me throw out some interim suggestions:
1. Block aggregation sites that point to your content.
Too many that’s heresy. The conventional wisdom suggests that all traffic is good traffic. Every page view is more money. Why not take it ? Because its limited and you aren’t selling it.
The value of the traffic sent by most sites is minimal at best. Lets look at your best friend Michael Wolf’s site Newser.com. According to Quantcast he gets about 24k unique users every day. If 1 pct of those users went to a Fox Site, say the NY Post, and each looked at 5 pages, that would be a total gain of 1.2k Page Views. If you were able to sell 1oopct of those at $15 CPM, which you can’t. You would make $18 per day. About $ 6.5k per year. Best case.
More likely, in this economy, you are not selling 90pct of the inventory he sends you. Heck, you aren’t selling a big chuck of the inventory that you get on your sites anyway, so the marginal value of the traffic sent by Newser.com might be about zero.
Why would you help a site, that is a direct competitor for minimal incremental revenue ? It’s not worth it. You know what is worth it ? When someone is sent from the site,let them fall on a page that lets them know that you don’t consider Newser.com a valid news or reference site. Newser.com has chosen to front end our content and we don’t appreciate it. As a result, we are blocking access. To get up to the minute news, please go directly to NYPost.com (or whatever site). Of course Newser.com will quickly stop sending you traffic. But the loss will be theirs. There will be stories that you cover better than anyone. Michael will have to find someone else.
The real question of course is whether other major news site copy what you have done ? What if the NY Times and the Washington Post do the same thing ? What if CNN, Tribune Papers and MSNBC join in ? I will tell you what happens. The aggregator sites that try to front end the content you invest a ton of money to create will find themselves all relying on AP, Reuters and individual bloggers.
This is where all the netizens jump in and tell me Im crazy. That news sites won’t ever do this. Thats not the internet way. Which of course is exactly how they respond to every business question involving the net. The major news sites are keeping the aggregators that don’t originate news content alive. From Drudge Report on down. You are crazy to do so. Let the search engines send you traffic. Block the rest. Your revenue impact will be minimal. The competitive impact significant.
2.Other than the WSJ, don’t ever sell content ala carte. It only works for content that impacts company’s and individuals bank accounts in real time. The Wall Street Journal can sell subscriptions because if a businessperson or trader doesn’t have the information the minute its published, they could be in serious financial trouble. The WSJ moves markets. You can charge for it. Page 6 doesn’t move markets. Foxsports doesn’t move markets. People won’t pay for it by story. They won’t pay for a general interest or newspaper, tv or sports website by the day, week or month unless they absolutely have to know what you publish for business reasons. There aren’t enough of those people around to pay the bills per site.
Cuban picks mostly unknown news aggregator Newser as an example of sites to block access. How about Google? It is also an aggregation site? Should News Corp. block Google too? I wonder what Cuban thinks about that? According to his advice Newscorp should block Google too. That would be retarded IMHO.