We’ve seen this week 2 big events in the paywall industry:

1. The New York time paywall fiasco
2. Press+ / Journalism online being sold to RR Donnelley & Sons

For those interested in content monetization, paywalls, and subscriptions/freemium strategies, these two provide a lot of interesting insights.

First, the NYT

The New York Times is said to have invested $40M in building it paywall technology, and to be fair, it delivers a pretty complex solution:

• Free articles up to a given threshold (in their case 20)
• Takes into account incoming traffic sources (Google vs Facebook vs Twitter etc), and adjusts the free counter
• Manages single and multiple user sessions, if you come the same day or read the same articles on different days. There are most certainly some other bells and whistles that we missed.

But why did they create such a complex system? The answer seems to be to keep incoming traffic from valuable referral sources in order to keep the advertising revenues and site indexing, while starting to charge subscriptions to users and generate incremental revenues.

Yet, by creating such a complex piece of software, the New York Times teams have failed to deliver the most basic functionality of a paywall: protect content to create an incentive to pay for it.

There are many loopholes in the system, and to avoid offended our NYT friends, we focused here are the 3 main ones:

1- Simple javascript in a bookmark can disable the system altogether.

2- Twitter mentions automatically point to articles, so you can always access via Twitter

3- Juggle between devices (PC, Mac, iPhone, Android) and browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome) and you can access hundreds of articles instead of just 20.

And all these hacks were already in place before the paywall actually even started….

Second, Press+

(more…)

In the past 10 days, we’ve seen a huge buzz around the launch of Google One Pass. It is pretty amazing how a fairly simple solution can generate such hype. It seems the timing was really perfect, with a lot of frustration coming out of Apple’s policies to charge 30% on all paid content, while Google only requires a 10% fee.

But there is a lot more than the % of revenue when it comes to making content monetization strategies a success, and one of the most critical is freedom of choice.

What does Google One Pass not solve?

While it addresses the need for single registration and cross-browser readership – similar to Cleeng – the challenge with One Pass is that it forces both Publishers and Users to get into a locked ecosystem, with limited flexibility toward future market evolutions. It limits freedom.

A- Freedom for Publishers:

• Control: Today Google is a publisher’s best friend, but has it always been the case? Google currently controls about more than 1/3 of any publisher traffic. By also controlling access to what readers buy, it taking control of a role that used the be the publishers.
• Flexibility to adapt to the brand needs of publishers: For large publishers, the need to stay within a certain brand environment with their customers is critical and the capacity to nurture their installed base is at the core of their business models. Can One Pass adapt to such needs, and cope with their requirements?
• Innovation: In 2010, iPad was the buzz. This year, it looks like One Pass will be the publishing world’s newest darling. What might come in 2012 and 2013…? The digital ecosytem is evolving extremely fast, and the need to adapt to upcoming technological innovations is fundamental for any publishers to survive. Look for example at the phenomenal growth of the Amazon Kindle (Businessweek).

(more…)