The Opportunity

There’s an idea going around right now that contends micro-payments for news online would help fund the journalism valued by readers. It’s a quaint thought.

The problem? That idea ignores several generations of how the business of journalism works, not to mention failed experiments in the last decade. We have tread this ground.

Readers never did “pay” for the news, really. I’d bet less than 20 percent of any newspaper’s entire revenue model ever came from subscriptions. Newspapers did make their money by selling advertising. That funded the journalism, as well as the costly means of production and delivery.

Do we really believe this is all that different online? What can go away is the expensive infrastructure required for production, and a distribution system that’s outdated and untimely. Our opportunity now is to fund journalism, not all the associated costs of doing the business of print on paper delivered daily.

The world has opened up. Not embracing that is foolish.

Information online, famously, wants to be free. That’s our collective expectation.

Couple that with an audience that will not pay for news online, like they might a song from iTunes (one of my colleagues likes to say you don’t listen to news over and over again, as you do with music).

Add in a dash of competition for attention in a world overrun with information.

Sprinkle in that free actually is a business model working for many places.

And, well, you get the picture. The marketplace does not support the idea that micro-payments will work. We should not spend time thinking down this path. It’s a dead end.

What should we do instead? Design a free experience that’s able to support itself.

About that advertising problem

We have to make the online advertising experience better.

Wait, let’s make it good. Just better won’t do.

Because many of us believe that the online reading experience depends on advertising to succeed, we need to invent new forms that enhance reading. We need to find forms that will provide advertisers with value while not diminishing the experience that draws people to the content in the first place.

We also must see that many ads are rich with content. They need to exist in an environment that makes sense. The best of the advertising out there begins to understand that role in the experience it has with its audience.

The smartest brands are forging new ground by connecting with customers as never before. The social media landscape has given companies a chance to show empathy, provide useful information, and break down the old walls that existed. It’s a new frontier.

It might well be that we can find ways to support online journalism without the overt advertising subsidy. We have that opportunity if we initiate an increased awareness of those behaviors that make us all willing consumers of information. We must see anew. We have to locate in this process how the journalism, the advertising and the intersection of the two create new meaning.

That kind of thinking may result in a fantastic formula for the function of advertising, pioneering forms for linking users with brands as an essential enhancement for products and services. It’s a concept not lost on the most successful companies. They’re already doing it.

In the meantime, as we learn our way ahead in what will work for journalism, we need less intrusive ads that can enhance the overall relationship we have with valued content. We also need to embrace a mindset that accepts failures on the way to radical change.

Otherwise, we’re just driving readers away, much like newspapers did by littering pages with such density of advertising that, in many instances, the ads were only talking to each other and not to any content or context. The pacing did not make sense. The experience was diminished.

Why replicate the bad inside pages of failing newspapers on the Web? There must be a better way.

There’s a reason we like that New York Times reading experience on the iPhone (free of advertising in all its pristine readability). We are readers first.

We have to see how we can make those kinds of experiences work and fund themselves without consumers paying directly for the content, which won’t work because the expectation of “free” online is so pervasive.

Certain interactions, when conceived correctly and nurtured by community, can be the content. There’s a reason they call it the experience economy.

To that end, we must think deeply about how advertising cannot be the awful turn-off that we all avert our eyes from. How it’s good when done well. Valuable when done exceptionally.

Enhancing these experiences would be a win. For everyone.