Nieman Journalism Lab |
| Are you a young dude interested in news? All else equal, this study says you’re a top paywall target Posted: 23 Apr 2012 11:23 AM PDT
Here’s a biggie: How do you get someone to pay for online news? A new study (PDF here) out of the University of Texas develops a theoretical model to begin answering that question. The goal of the study, by Iris Chyi and Angela M. Lee, is to clarify the interrelationship among news preference, use, and intent to pay. What emerges, among other things, is a profile of the kind of people most likely to pay for online news: Young males who are — wait for it — interested in the news. That last part is key, because while younger people are more likely to pay for news online, the study finds, they’re also less likely to be interested in news in the first place. Another paradox: People say they prefer reading print products, yet online use is growing. In other words, consumers don’t always use what they prefer, and they’re not always willing to spend money on what they use. That’s an idea that Chyi has been exploring since the 1990s. She sometimes refers to it as “ramen noodle theory,” which we’ve written about before: People might prefer steak over ramen — but when it comes time to reach for their wallets, they opt for ramen more often. Because it’s free and abundant, the “ramen” is perceived as inferior — which reinforces consumers’ preference for “steak.” This could help explain why Chyi found “very weak correlations” between use and intent to pay in her latest study. This is from its abstract:
Given how many variables play a role in a consumer’s decision to buy online news, the takeaway is a bit more complicated, and that’s kind of the point: Fully understanding online news consumption is about more than just looking at how often people are going online. News organizations must also get dig into what consumer’s want, what they’re willing to buy, then figure out how (and why) these factors overlap. “The overall picture when we are looking at intention to pay for online news is that we have to consider as many as five predictors,” Chyi told me. “I think that sort of explains why most newspapers have found it’s so difficult to monetize their online content.” From the study:
The study was presented Saturday at the International Symposium on Online Journalism. Chyi’s study was based on an online survey of 767 adult respondents in August 2010. While that seems like a really long time ago in Internet years — the first iPad was only five months old — Chyi says her research is current enough to offer a useful picture of a longer-term shift she’s tracked for more than a decade. Though print is declining by just about every metric, Chyi is convinced that there is an “over-optimistic bias toward online news.” At the same time, she acknowledges it’s “very late and very difficult to change the perception that the future is online or online-only.” It’s not that she’s anti-technology, she says: “I believe that new platforms will be really important for people to access news, but in terms of how to monetize it, I think it’s getting more and more difficult,” says Chyi, who also sees a conflation between print decline and online growth. “Very often we mix the two together and say, ‘Because print is declining, the future must be online.’ But I don’t think that’s the case.” Whatever the case may be, the theoretical model her study produced might offer the beginnings of a structural map for those who need to find a way to convince audiences that their news products are worth paying for. |
| Wall Street Journal dives into live, continuous coverage with its new Markets Pulse stream Posted: 23 Apr 2012 08:37 AM PDT
The Wall Street Journal on Monday unveiled Markets Pulse, a platform for a continuous flow of news — including blog posts, articles, videos, tweets, photos, and other elements — that readers can dip into throughout the day from their computers or from a mobile device. The idea is to provide more choices to readers who are increasingly seeking news on-the-go. Think of it as a daily liveblog of the markets: At this writing, Markets Pulse been updated 12 times in the past hour. Some of those are simply embeds of WSJ stories, which can be read in full without leaving the stream; others are updates of barely tweet length. (“Dow Down 150: All indexes are down more than 1.2%.”) “This is just another way for them to access our content,” Raju Narisetti, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network, told me. “Obviously, a lot of our readers are paid subscribers, so they should be able to get WSJ everywhere, wherever they want it.” This isn’t the first time the newspaper has experimented with this kind of approach. It created a four-day stream for its Oscar coverage this February, and more recently it streamified its coverage of the presidential election in France. But Markets Pulse is built around an area of coverage rather than a finite event, which means it has the potential to be…neverending. Creating an open-ended stream for markets coverage makes sense for a few reasons. It’s an area that a lot of Journal readers are already tracking, and one that lends itself to constant updates. “Markets is kind of an ongoing story all day, especially when the U.S. markets are open, and there’s an audience that follows it fairly religiously all the time,” Narisetti said. “Rather than having to go to an article or a video in different, discrete places, this allows them to kind of have one place.” (It’s not for nothing that Bloomberg describes its terminals as a “massive data stream” — it’s a metaphor that works for the flow of a market day. Markets Stream would seem to be a decent candidate to be a second-screen companion to a Bloomberg terminal.) Markets Pulse also includes an embed of the Journal’s video player right next to the content whenever a live show is on. With the newspaper’s big push in video, particularly live video, having a page that readers can treat as they’d treat CNBC — that is, always on — could help increase the return on that investment. It also gives reporters a place to put all kinds of information — short updates, tweets, and other elements that don’t always fit in a traditional article. But the news stream approach is about more than creating a centralized hub of information. Streams are also about tailoring the experience to readers’ habits. When British network ITV unveiled its stream-based online redesign last month, ITV digital director Julian March described about the importance of recognizing the “skimming and digging” that people like to do online. Here’s how he put it:
The format may also help drive traffic to Wall Street Journal content by fostering a habit of checking for frequent bite-sized updates the same way that people routinely check their email inboxes and Twitter feeds. News streams also seem to have the advantage of stickiness — meaning readers spend time on streams longer than they do on traditional news sites. (Think of how sticky social streams like Facebook’s newsfeed or Twitter are, especially compared with traditional news sites.) Narisetti, who started his job at the Journal in February after leaving The Washington Post, says there are more experiments like this one to come: “We’re going to experiment in multiple ways, and this just felt like one of the more interesting and fun ways to do it,” he said. The approach seems consistent with his mentality he described to us back in January: "I'm a big believer in newsrooms being in a permanent beta stage.” |
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