Had lunch with an MBA professor, with a marketing Ph.D., and he asked me why newspapers decided it was a good idea to put all their print content and more onto their Web sites, without charging for access to that stuff.
Good question, I said.
He said that, as a full WSJ subscriber, he values the stuff that he gets online that isn't available in the paper or to the average Internet surfer. He thinks it's hooey that the New York Times dismantled its pay-online system in order to allegedly attract so many more eyeballs from a totally free site. Doubts that the NYT has turned those eyeballs into money that surpasses the subscriptions it was pulling in for its pay site.
He said newspapers should treat their Web sites as a news digest, teasing to the print product or to the full versions available via online subscription. His experience is, this is much more common with magazines, many of which provide only a limited Web site to non-subscribers.
He also had these thoughts:
-- Newspapers never had to worry about the 18-to-35 year olds because, for so long, that demographic a) wasn't countable the way it is in modern marketing research, and b) wasn't as coveted by advertisers, who have gotten more sophisticated as the audience has, too. Sponsors used to try to sway all of us in our buying behavior but now target the younger consumers who aren't as "set in their ways" as older folks.
-- Newspapers almost always were something that you grew up into, in terms of buying/subscribing to one of your own. You might have grown up reading the paper that hit the doorstep at home, but it was Mom & Dad's paper. Only when you got a place of your own -- most likely buying rather than renting -- and put down some roots in your community (house, property taxes, kids, schools) did you become highly likely to purchase a newspaper. Or, of course, if you took public transportation to/from work.
-- So, a big chunk of the audience most coveted by many modern advertisers are not and frankly never have been major newspaper readers. Back in the day, the near-monopoly conditions that papers enjoyed in their markets overrode this problem, as did the limits on advertisers identifying and targeting the 18-to-35 year olds. But instead of evolving in their advertising marketing to be more persuasive and appealing to their core audience, the folks who run newspapers just chased after a group of readers that they never were going to own with a print version anyway.
-- Then they gave their content away to the readers their advertisers coveted the most, scratching their heads as to why those technology-adept youngsters didn't evolve into print subscribers.
It's almost as if some market researchers decreed that advertising is most effective in a pre-verbal form, catching kids before they turn 5 years old. What would newspapers do then? Publish in baby talk, "Goo goo ga ga?" Abandon the English language as musty and out-dated and "dead?" Find something else to give away for free to the babies, then wonder why they don't buy the same stuff once they hit first grade?
Anyway, the Professor left our lunch shaking his head over the colossal blunder of how newspaper publishers and editors turned the opportunities of the Internet into the Ultimate Challenge.
