The Problem: Much reporting is now behind paywalls, making individual stories difficult or very expensive to access for people while media outlets are struggling to generate revenue.
The Solution: An online subscription that gives credits for lots of different news outlets to enable people to pick and choose from a buffet of media.
This idea was born out of recent frustration trying to get access to several articles people had shared, which were all stuck behind paywalls and required a subscription to access. I didn’t want to pay for a full subscription as I only wanted these one off articles and I was not interested in the more general reporting of the various sites.
We have all likely read about the difficulties that news organisations are having in monetising their online content as advertising revenues decline and not as many people subscribe to gain access to content behind paywalls.
There seems to be a fairly simple solution to help solve both of these problems, which is to create a global media subscription service which provides subscribers with credits to gain access to articles behind paywalls.
The most popular articles would generate the most revenue and spend could be easily tracked to ensure equitable distribution of funds. And subscribers would then have access to a wealth of quality online content from multiple sources, rather than simply sticking to one source or relying on free content.
The subscription model would be a fairly standardised direct debit monthly subscription, much like a mobile telephone subscription, with tokens costing less as the value of the subscription grew (e.g. £2 per month gives you 10 credits, £5 per month gives you 50 credits and so on), and flexibility could be built into it so that tokens could be rolled over from month to month and extras purchased if a subscriber ran out.
While some news outlets might be concerned about losing out from their current subscribers, it seems unlikely that this model would lead to many people dropping their current subscriptions, but instead would more likely be an additional purchase to enable them to access a slightly wider range of content each month. More likely, it would increase the overall number of people paying for news as more signed up knowing they would get widespread access to content.
More news outlets could then put more of their content behind paywalls, encouraging wider adoption of the subscription model and helping to generate more revenue for those outlets.
Tests would need to be carried out on potential customers to assess what the correct price points were and news outlets would have to sign up to be part of the scheme, but it offers a potential way to help news outlets generate the revenue needed to produce great articles and help people to gain access to those articles without costing them the earth.
Comments