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• Distinctive – generating content or style with a recognizable point of view.
• Relevant – curatorial skill that enables all its material to consciously attract an audience.
• Broad-based – operating at scale, with the requisite high circulation for its niche.
• Niche – defined by a particular quality of its audience. Even the New York Times is a niche publication now.
• Hub-like – connecting people and ideas, becoming the primary destination for those connections. In any given domain, there is typically only room for one hub.
• Opportunistic in commercialization — making lots of experiments in raising money, not limiting their business to any source of income, working with lead generation, premium, advertising, etc., thinking in terms of multiple business streams.
• Marketing and Interface design above a threshold: It must be “good enough” but not necessarily “world-class” (though it could be if that’s part of the distinction.)
• Technologically sophisticated in a truly audience-aware manner – (“You don’t take an iPad to the poolside.”)
In 1998, the artist Anton Vidokle opened up his first Hotmail account. He was unemployed at the time, and along with a few other broke curator friends, put on a show called “The Best Surprise Is No Surprise” in the Chinatown Holiday Inn. Strapped for cash, they could only afford to rent a room for one night, leaving them without the funds to produce and disseminate press releases. He decided to instead e-mail a release to thirty or forty friends. Five hundred people showed up at the hotel. Stunned by the turnout, Vidokle had to act fast, and as damage control, told the front desk that they were making a film about the art world that was being directed by an eccentric Japanese filmmaker who was only in New York for one night. Soon after that serendipitous evening, Vidokle and friends harnessed what they learned from their brush with online virality, coupled with traditional word-of-mouth, and formed a company they called e-flux—short for Electronic Flux Corporation—a paid online service of press releases. It officially launched in January, 1999 and has since become the art world’s “central broadcasting network.”[1]
Unlike advertisements in art magazines that come primarily from commercial galleries, e-flux prioritizes public institutions, museums, biennials, non-profits, and art fairs. Organizations pay a fee to advertise on the list, and anyone can subscribe for free. Today, the privately-owned company’s four or five daily e-mails reach the inboxes of around an estimated 80,000 visual arts professionals worldwide. In addition to its main mailing list, e-flux runs Art an Education, a partnership with Artforum magazine, that focuses on news for academics and Art-Agenda, a list goes out to the combined databases of e-flux and Art Basel, the world’s largest art fair. Art-Agenda also publishes online exhibition reviews and pays its writers around $400 for each piece. A recent article in Modern Painters suggests that e-flux is valued at around $2 million. Based on my own anecdotal research, an advertisement on e-flux costs around $600, which, when multiplied by the number of mailings each organization does per year yields that amount.
It is fascinating that even today, when it’s easy and free to share content with a wide audience, both mainstream and underground exhibition spaces and publications still pay a few hundred dollars to be featured on a listserv. The model seems outdated, but that is why it works. The success of e-flux is due in part to Vidokle being the an early adapter to nascent e-mail technology, spotting a need within his community for an affordable way to distribute press releases, and providing a high-quality service that remains invaluable to art professionals around the world. Between their three mailing lists, they have an exceptional network from which to draw, and in turn, have attracted a great deal of “attention and responsiveness”[2] from their readership. The company charged institutions a fee from its inception, so they have no reason to stop. They are in the opposite situation of online publications that alienate their readership by later deciding to put up paywalls.
Another facet of e-flux’s success is its founders’ deep understanding of their audience: they are extremely well-connected. They art world is a famously social realm where, for better or worse, connections matter a great deal. In an interview with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist (the current co-director of exhibitions and director of international projects at London’s esteemed Serpentine Gallery) about the history of e-flux, Vidokle casually mentions that his friend Ernesto Neto, an important Brazilian artist, showed up at the hotel at 4am with a case of wine, and the party continued[3]. E-flux’s circle includes many top critics and artists working today, including Lawrence Weiner, Liam Gillick, Jan Verwoert, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. As Gillick told Modern Painters, “E-flux claims that it’s open and democratic, but it naturally excludes people. It’s a very certain group, and there is often a gap between the broad statement of intent and the reality of the situation.”[4]
Vidokle and his main collaborators, artist Julieta Aranda and editor Brian Kuan Wood, traffic in context creation. As artists and curators, they view e-flux as an independent self-financed art project. From a theoretical standpoint, the list is a platform for organizations to circulate and exchange information, an idea that is an integral part of their other collective projects. They are as careful in whose events and publications they choose to publicize as they would be in selecting works of art for a show; for them, there is no distinction. Organizations pay a fee for e-flux to send out their announcements, but that does not guarantee that they will be included on the mailing list. E-flux sells prestige by association. They cater to the same sphere of contemporary art that they are part of, namely arts professionals like themselves who are interested in social theory and conceptual practices.
The revenue from e-flux’s mailing lists fund various projects, conferences, books, and a journal that all broadly tackle ideas about self-organization, mass communication, and labor. In 2004, Vidokle and Aranda moved from their shared studio space to a building on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side and are currently based in a storefront on Essex St. With a staff of ten people and economic engine based upon firing off e-mails, they have little overhead, so they are able to focus on their myriad discursive endeavors. They are perhaps best known for their 2007 symposia, unitednationsplaza, a response to the cancellation of Manifesta 6, the European biennial, which Vidokle was supposed to co-curate. Instead, he set up a year-long project behind a supermarket in East Berlin to bring together over a hundred artists, writers, and academics to hold seminars, lectures, and various other presentations. The New York offshoot of this event was Night School, a year of weekly seminars held at the New Museum. They have also produced a library drawn from the artist Martha Rosler’s personal collection, and an art-video rental shop that became a traveling exhibition to various museums for five years.
In 2008, e-flux Journal began as a way to continue the critical dialogues started by those who had worked in unitednationsplaza and Night School, with the emphasis placed on what the writers personally find urgent, as opposed to the set hierarchies and priorities of region-specific publications. They pay their writers $750 per piece, and the journal is free online. Art centers can print and distribute the journal however they would like, for little or no cost, using whatever means available to them—for example, printed straight off the computer screen and photocopied, or with an off-set printer.[5] E-flux also publishes two or three books a year with the small German art publisher, Sternberg Press. By leveraging connections with both major and obscure art organizations, continual experimentation with alternative production models, and shrewd scrappiness, e-flux maintains itself as a quiet, yet indispensible force in the global art world.
Other:
“An Interview with Anton Vidokle of e-flux.” Dossier Journal, April, 20, 2009.
Aol strategy has shifted significantly since it’s inception in the late ’80s. The company started off as a distribution system and method for connecting people to the internet, transitioned into a content portal, and then morphed into an advertising-funded giant.
Aol, like many internet companies, makes its money by displaying ads against content. However, many have associated Aol’s relatively poor performance to their core strategy, as demonstrated by “The Aol Way.” This leaked presentation detailed Aol’s plan for revamping their content monetization practices (http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way). The document’s release led to several high profile departures, including David Eun (Head of Aol Media and Studios). As Paul Miller of Engadget blogged before resigning:
It doesn’t take a veteran of the publishing world to realize that AOL has its heart in the wrong place with content. As detailed in the “AOL Way,” and borne out in personal experience, AOL sees content as a commodity it can sell ads against. That might make good business sense (though I doubt it), but it doesn’t promote good journalism or even good entertainment, and it doesn’t allow an ambitious team like the one I know and love at Engadget to thrive. (Source: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/02/19/the-aol-way-claims-its-first-victim-engadget-editor-paul-miller-resigns/)
Aol’s investors reacted negatively as well – the stock has yet to recover:
 Aol Stock Performance At the core of The Aol Way is forecasting article profitability before creating any content. Every form of content has an associated cost, CPM, and required Page Views to Break Even:
 CPMs and Page Views to Break Even Then Aol has protocols to decide which venue to use for each form of content creation, ranging from low-cost Seed (articles and photos)/StudioNow (videos), to In-House Writers, to Notable Freelancers. It is important to note that this model excludes high-cost journalistic content – the only long-form content that can be funded is that which is pre-paid for by committed advertisers. As a result, a paid advertorial is Aol’s quality ceiling.
 Venues for Article Production Unsurprisingly, the relatively low CPM for online content compared to print newspapers (approximately a $400 CPM) leads to a high Page View barrier to profitability. The need for 7,000 page views to recover the $25 investment in an average piece of low quality content forces low-cost producers such as Aol Seed and Demand Media to focus on Evergreen content – content that can be SEO’d and appear in searches thousands of times over.
Unfortunately, it is clear that these sites need to produce significant quantities of evergreen articles in order to generate traffic to their sites, and enable them to attract larger advertisers and invest in higher cost videos and articles. The low quality content is necessary to cross-subsidize other content, and form a base-level number of users for the platform.
According to Aol’s Q1 goals, Aol plans to have 7,000 Median PV/Article:
 AOL's Monthly Strategy However, at a median 7,000 PVs, only half of their content actually hits this PV threshold. Since 7,000 PVs is the barrier for Aol’s lowest-cost content, Aol needs a few extraordinarily popular articles to make up many multiples to cover the rest. The probability of an individual article recouping its costs is low – arguably undoing the purpose of the initial PVs-to-break-even calculation.
Perhaps this is why the Huffington Post acquisition was necessary – Aol needed journalists capable of higher quality, longer-form, more in-depth content (according to Arianna Huffington, blogs contribute little to overall page views, and politics is only 15% of the HuffPo PVs – http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/the-economics-of-blogging-and-the-huffington-post/).
After weeks of looking for a media business to research, I started asking myself about media I actually consume and realized that one of the few media I spend money in is printed on getting Monocle magazine. It has something that makes it attractive even at that price, so I thought it was worth researching.
Monocle is a very unusual publication, specially for the current times. It states itself as “A briefing on global affairs, business, culture & design”, and people describes it as a marriage between The Economist and Wallpaper. It is a print-only magazine with a £5 ($10) cover price, a price quite high compared to others. But the most surprising is that the yearly subscription price is not cheaper but higher (£75= ~$120). It includes shipping to anywhere in the world and exclusive access to the online archive, which is not available otherwise. The magazine publishes 10 180 pages issues a year plus a yearly city index with a ranking of the 25 most livable cities. Continue reading Business Model Research: Monocle Magazine
strategy+learning
This should get you a PDF of the “strategy+learning” prototype that I demonstrated in class.
So what’s a hometown newspaper got going for it at this point? Twitter, according to some, is the main way to get news these days. The internet is wondering: “Why would I pay for the NYTimes online when I can just get my news through Twitter?”. Even ITP graduate students are susceptible to this kind of thinking; if even the newspaper of record is threatened by this social media, 140 character domination, how is a small town newspaper going to cope in this environment? Will a smaller paper thrive? Will they fail? How much do people actually want to read the news on an iPad? How is digital advertising fairing for a small-town newspaper?
To check in on the state of local media, I spoke to the Executive Editor for the Portland Press Herald in Portland, ME. Mr. Wasser has been working in the newspaper industry for over two decades now. He spent much of his early career running the sports pages of the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader in Pennsylvania. During the mid-90s he became the assistant general manager and online editor it the Time’s Leader website. Since then he has worked primarily in the online space. Mr. Wasser was named the Executive Editor for the Portland Press Herald in 1999, shortly after the paper was bought by MaineToday Media.
At the Portland Press Herald, says Mr. Wasser, digital strategy is key component in their business model. When asked how much of the business of running the paper revolved around digital strategy, Mr. Wasser replied: “All of it”. The Portland Press Herald has maintained a website since 1995 (the first available snapshot from the waybackmachine is from 1996), but according to Mr. Wasser, the website was largely unavailable as recently as three or four years ago. After being bought by MaineToday Media, the Press Herald relaunched their website and focused on getting up to date. As Mr. Wasser told me “We twitter and tweet and twaddle and we Facebook”. Currently, the Press Herald maintains a website, a Twitter account, a Facebook account and has launched apps for the iPad, iPhone, and other mobile devices. The Portland Press Herald is hooked into the new culture of instant news. Their content is distributed immediately through a number of outlets to any number of people.
In an era of instant news, how does a paper continue to sell physical copies? This question is always reinforced when I return to Maine to my parents house. I’ll catch a glimpse of the front page of the paper and think “That headline was out of date yesterday”. The Press Herald does not provide in-depth reporting. Almost all of their international stories are from the wire, and the paper does not go to great lengths to write in-depth analysis of state and local events. How does such generic news continue to be distributed, and consumed in print?
To the Press Herald, the print stories it offers are a chance to expand and add context to a story published on the website. For example, a couple of high-profile criminal cases had come to conclusion in Maine when I was there last. The story that was published to the website was some variation of “Defendant guilty! X amount of years to serve!”. The next day in the paper edition the paper is able to expand the story and provide charts, graphs and a deeper level of analysis to the story. No matter what the public may think, long form analysis does take some time to put together. The paper is able to use that lead-time to provide a better story to the consumer. Mr. Wasser also identified the appeal to different demographics: not everyone is going to read the paper online, and many still prefer to read it in physical form. To switch to a digital only model would immediately lock out a large percentage of their customer base. The paper has a model for integrating digital content with print content. Both spaces offer plusses and minuses, and both spaces are valuable for the paper. The paper has a working model for the integration of print news and digital news, but is it successful? Is there a business model that allows the paper to make money and continue distributing news?
Mr. Wasser is determined to move the Press Herald in to the business of making money online. As he told me: “anyway that people are making money online, we plan too and hope to make money online”. To that end, the paper has expanded into territory owned nationally by the deal site GroupOn. The MaineDeal is a deal website similar to GroupOn. Users sign up through the Portland Press Herald website, and receive deals in their inbox. To Mr. Wasser, MaineDeals exploits one of the strengths that the Press Herald possesses: knowledge of local businesses accumulated over years of living and working with them. GroupOn’s initial foray in to Maine was worrying, but ultimately inconsequential: they began running national deals that did little address the needs or desires of the Maine population.
This illustrates one of the main advantages for a same time newspaper: they can attract advertising revenue from small businesses that are unable or unwilling to advertise with a national brand. For many companies, the benefits of advertising online are difficult to see. For example, there is a pizza shop in my hometown called the South Portland House of Pizza (or to my family “SoPoHoPo”, home of delicious cheeseburger subs). This pizza place doesn’t even have a website, the chances of their advertising online is small. However, the low price point and the highly targeted nature of online advertising would work well for a local pizza joint. There is no reason that local papers could not attract a broad advertising base through target online advertisements.
To Mr. Wasser, this local knowledge is exactly why local papers will not die. The content that the papers are able to provide will keep the community buying the paper, even if the paper employs a paywall for it’s online content. This argument sounds dubious, given the ease with which a network of local blogs could (and do) keep up with local events. However, there is evidence that Mr. Wasser may not be so far off. The Union-Bulletin, a local newspaper located in Walla-Walla Washington, implemented a paywall in 2009. Since then, the paper has seen little impact on it’s page views. The online services manager surmised:
“We definitely feel that there is no one reporting on the Walla Walla Valley as well or as comprehensively as we are,” Virgen said. “Whereas the Tri-City Herald often files stories based on press releases or on U-B stories, we actually have reporters out in the community, which I think makes a big difference in the minds of our readers. So, we felt that the community greatly values our journalism and would find the nominal fee acceptable.” (Link)
The same could be said for any local newspaper in the country. The combination of highly targeted advertising capable of attracting a wide base of local businesses, combined with unique content, could be enough to keep local newspapers a valuable, and thriving part of the media landscape.
It is difficult to assess how well the Press Herald is doing. It is still operational, and still employs a fair number of people. Casual analysis reveals that the paper, quite slim in print, reveals heavily on wire stories to fill it’s meager pages. The most attention the paper has gained over the past couples years has come from scandels, and not the good kind. The paper appears uninterested in making any sorts of waves in the community, and only interested in reporting the news as it happens, not going out and discovering news.
Despite all the doom and gloom about the newspaper industry, Mr. Wasser sees little to be worried about. He insisted that the newspaper is not dead, and that much of the fuss comes from the very entities evidently in their death throws. Maybe, if the newspaper industry would quite convincing people that they are dying, and if they are able to reset customer expectations about what media costs, maybe the paper will be able to survive.
1. What else exists like it – and why is it still needed?
2. How will it generate revenue?
3. How will it be sustained / sustain itself?
4. What value will it offer to its customers?
5. How does this business model compare to others?
6. Who’s on the team?
7. What kind of content will you develop for it?
8. Who is the audience? User? Customer? Buyer?
9. Who’s going to fund it?
10. Timeline: How long will it take to get how far?
11. WHY DO YOU WANT TO DO IT?
We have become so accustomed to free content on the Internet that publications struggle to survive by trying to rally print subscriptions while giving their online content away for free. Each month I open my mailbox to find a handful of letters from women’s magazines. The publications are different but each one has a similar strategy: entice print subscriptions by offering low annual prices and throwing in ‘free stuff’ to sweeten the deal. I’ve seen these gifts range from tote bags to lip gloss and most recently, W magazine promised me a complementary W branded scarf with my paid subscription. It made me wonder. What if publications tried the reverse approach and offered products while throwing in the publication to sweeten the deal?
I stumbled upon a new start-up that is doing just that. It’s an editorial/e-commerce/subscription sampling mashup called Birchbox based in New York City. Launched in September 2010 by Harvard business school grads Haley Barna, 27, and Katia Beauchamp, 28, the company “aims to help the $52 billion beauty business learn which free trials become full size sales” through “the combination of customized samples and rich online content”. (Fast Company, Feb 2011)
For $10 a month or $110 annually (shipping is free and customers can quit at any time), subscribers receive a beautifully packaged hot pink recyclable box filled with 4-5 deluxe sized samples of high-end beauty products. Like print magazines, the boxes are distributed once a month. Birchbox partners with over 30 different beauty brands and sends out samples that, for the most part, are early in the product life cycle. After sampling, subscribers are encouraged to fill out feedback forms which are then sent to the brands. For their participation, which is currently at 10%, customers will earn points that they can then cash in for products in Birchbox’s e-commerce shop.
All of this is complemented by online editorial content. Fashionesta.com describes Birchbox “like opening up the latest magazine and having the featured products pouring out.” Birchbox publishes both a blog powered by Tumblr multiple times a day and what they describe as a digital “magazine designed to help you get the most out of your stuff” called The Haute Box. Under the direction of Director of Content, Mollie Chen, the site offers articles on a variety of beauty-related topics and how-to videos showing the latest trends. Birchbox also incorporates a guest blogging program with well-known bloggers like Dorothy McGivney from Jauntsetter and Grace Atwood from Stripes and Sequins. Having guest bloggers helps diversify content outside of the area of the core writers.
When it comes to marketing strategy, the founders say they use “limited marketing muscle”. After typing in “Birchbox” in a search engine, it’s easy to see why. There are thousands of enthusiastic beauty bloggers, with no affiliation to the company, promoting Birchbox on their own sites and making videos every month about the samples they received. There is also an incentive in the form of ‘beauty points’ for members who refer their friends and Birchbox is very active in social media. The company has it’s own YouTube channel called Birchbox TV and it is estimated that 10-15% of new customers hear about the company directly from Facebook and Twitter. From a marketing point of view, Birchbox is in a good position to gain insights about its market because it uses the promise of personalization to entice customers to answer survey questions about their demographics, income, buying behavior and preferences.
The financial model is promising as it is able to support free online editorial content without any advertisements on the site. With $1.4 million in capital from Accel Partners, First Round Capital and several individual investors, Birchbox used the funds to scale and hire employees. Birchbox’s revenue comes from two sources: paid subscriptions to the sampling program and through its e-commerce shop that sells full-size versions of the sampled products. Partnering beauty brands provide products for free in exchange for customer data and information about the sell-through rate of full size products. Traditionally, it has been very difficult for beauty brands to track how samples translate into sales so this is mutually beneficial for both Birchbox and the brand. Within 4 months of launching Birchbox had acquired 5000 members with 50 new customers joining each day (as of February 2011). Birchbox’s customer base in growing quickly and in March 2011 the company had 8000 subscribers, with 15% paying upfront for an annual membership.
Birchbox’s only competition is TestTube, a sampling program associated with New Beauty Magazine. The price point and distribution are different though. Shipments cost $29.95 plus an additional $8.95 for shipping and are distributed only 4 times a year. Also, while TestTube is affiliated with the magazine, the editorial content isn’t as connected to the samples that customers receive. I see this a major factor in Birchbox’s success.
Birchbox is a very new company but its initial success shows that there are more options for publications in the post-print media landscape. It’s not just a matter of deciding between setting up a paywall or supporting free content with advertising. All three dimensions of Birchbox’s business: the sampling program, the editorial content and the e-commerce site complement each other and contribute to an engaging customer experience. Birchbox truly is a mashup. It’s not strictly a publication, sampling service or online storefront and this diversification has really worked in its advantage so far. It will be interesting to see if Birchbox is able to sustain this model.
I’ve been asked to post the material on the SCARF model that I showed at the end of the last class. The basic model is:
• Status: We continually compare ourselves to others around us. That’s why offering feedback can be a statement of “superiority” that triggers a “fight-flight response”
• Certainty: Not knowing what will happen next requires extra neural energy and thus can be profoundly debilitating.
• Autonomy: Having a requisite level of control enables people to function even in stressful situations; which is why micromanaging is so debilitating.
• Relatedness: Teams of diverse people cannot be thrown together. The trust among them must be developed or they may neurologically see each other as unrelated, and as opponents.
• Fairness: “I’d rather get 25 cents if you get 25 cents than get $8 if you get $25.”
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Here are the images:
where customer engagement finally boosts business
Fred Wilson says: “If you are building a media oriented business, particularly one that has low marginal costs, meaning you build it once and the cost to serve an additional customer is negligible, then you have the unique opportunity to focus first and foremost on building your customer base or audience.”
His assertion in this statement leads us to ponder how this unique opportunity can turn out to be profitable when we evaluate a business model as successful. Whether a media publication has a healthy and symbiotic customer base is one of the crucial criteria for measuring success. It sounds like quite a task and seems to require some kind of predetermined financial support. However, GlobalPost(www.globalpost.com) business tactic of integrating building an audience pool and raising profits from it has been suggested as audacious and forward-thinking. I will explore what this online news organization that expects to be profitable next year is doing right to achieve nearly 2.5 million visitors per month and 10 awards in SABWE(the Society of American Business Writers and Editors)’s best in business.
GlobalPost was launched in January 2009 with $8.5 million from private investors as an online global news service reporting on multimedia foreign coverage from self-planted correspondents around the globe. On the editorial side, it has tapped on the niche market that thirsts for international news which has been neglected by media enterprises as a starting point for business. To maximize the satisfaction of this need for local coverage globally, it does not send reporters, but rather hires more than 100 freelance journalists from all over the world and makes their local voices heard through the high quality outlet. Compensation starts at $250 per story. Their stories in a wide range of types of topics are delivered in varied forms of depth and width from long-term projects to blog entries. GlobalPost has raised a great amount of capital to fund more in-depth reporting.
The look and navigation of the website is also appealing. The overall feel is close to a high-end magazine site exposing a lot of compelling photographs. The menu is properly organized containing what visitors would expect in the right categories. The layout is bold and clear enough to draw attention to feature articles, and additional applications including social media linking icons are displayed well and are not easy to miss. It has utilized a new commenting system in partnership with Facebook that allows readers to share their thoughts on all news articles with their friends.
The business model that GlobalPost has been implementing reveals three main revenue streams stated in its website as “web advertising, syndication, and paid membership, our innovative premium content service”. Web advertising is where it earns most of its money similar to most other online outlets. The list of advertisers – Xerox, Verizon, Singapore Airlines, Liberty Mutual Insurance, etc. – appears to be somewhat surprising for a young and small online startup. With syndication deals, GlobalPost licenses its content to media companies. So far, CBS, PBS, The Huffington Post, Reuters and many others have contracted with GlobalPost for cooperative content creation.
The third source of its profit, ‘paid content – innovate premium content service’ is what sets GlobalPost apart from their rivals. Most stories are free and open to all. Yet, if you become a member by purchasing the premium subscription, you receive exclusive and differentiated benefits which include unique web 2.0 aspects that provide members with rewards for their serious interests in what GlobalPost does. The membership actually enables readers to be part of this organization. They are given opportunities to voice their opinions by submitting story ideas and being voted by other members to be published and to construct interactive connections with editors and correspondents through a chat or conference call. A subscription costs $2.95/month and $29.95/year.
This loyalty-oriented approach can provoke some skepticism at first. How could this possibly work? Do people really care about international affairs to make this work? Do they really get engaged that much? The answer is “We don’t know yet.”. This business plan is still proving itself. Only around 500 people have joined so far. However, I have to admit that the motif seems very right and it is making money after all.
Online media business models have sacrificed their actual customer(=reader)s’ quality time only to gain advertisers. They are losing relationships with customers and missing a point in journalism, namely the use of collective minds for truthful stories that people should pay attention and listen to. As such I wonder why they are able to prosper while completely missing the point. Is it just okay as how it works now? On the other hand, GlobalPost is trying to innovate the existing business analogy by turning their eyes to what is important at the core - by committing itself to traditional journalism ideals. Content should be paid and requiring subscriptions is one of the better ways to do so. Subscriptions are a kind of fuel that generates real values to both the organization and its subscribers, and in GlobalPost’s case enhancing its journalism for the organization, which in turn rewards their subscribers beyond just giving extra access to content. This motif should pay off.
During several interviews, GlobalPost CEO Philip Balboni assured how positively he valued customers and customer intelligence as a revenue source.
“The more people who care about what we do, the greater the chances that they’re going to click on that big red arrow at the top of our site and consider becoming a GlobalPost member.”
“We’re not charging. We’re asking people to support GlobalPost journalism — and not without giving them something in return.”
He aims to obtain 250,000 subscribers by 2012 and hopes the revenue share of its subscription to increase up to around 50% over time with syndication. Ambitiously enough, GlobalPost has more than 100,000 Facebook fans and as mentioned earlier earned multiple awards for its pioneer approach and efforts. These are definitely good signs. I hope it is going somewhere, somewhere that has never been landed before – where customer engagement boosts business.
+ References
- Poynter
- Poynter
- Washington Post
- LA times
- Nieman Journalism Lab
- Editors Weblog
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