Whether you are The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or a blog like www.statclicks.com, how will you ultimately be rewarded for your content. Prior to the internet, newspapers made a ton of money from classifieds. In 1997 classifieds represented 41% of newspaper revenue, according to this article and fell to 28% by the end of 2008. The internet and sites like Craigslist completely disrupted that market leaving newspapers scrambling. As Google came on the scene and offered its Adwords program, a lot of ad dollars shifted from print, TV and other digital ads such as banners over to search because search works well for all parties. It just does. As print goes away in general with consumers getting their news on PCs, mobile phones, e-readers like the Kindle and now iPad and tablet devices the newspaper companies are struggling to redefine themselves. This isn’t news but it is an interesting discussion. Consumers still crave news content, they just crave it in different formats. Banner ads have always been tough as consumers train themselves to ignore them quickly. The only way to counter that is to make them more and more obnoxious which of course annoys readers and they go elsewhere. So what is the right model:

-Micropayments where you pay a few cents to read an individual article

-Monthly subscriptions where you are locked in to a monthly commitment

-Is there a way to infuse search into the news business? Can a newspaper integrate search in such a way the drives more searches within a site and allows for better targetted ads?

-What about advatorial content, where a brand pays to have an article written about their product or service. This discussion has stirred up a lot of controversy but it maybe worth a closer look. As long as the content is clearly marked as paid, why not? As a brand I get published in the publications of my choice and pay for that just as they would with an ad. The content can then be disseminated and viewed by whatever means the consumer wants (PC, mobile, RSS, etc.) The consumer, as long as it is obvious that this is a paid placement, can ignore the content as they can with an ad or read it if it is of interest. The publisher can earn revenue without destroying the look, feel and usability of their sites and apps, offering content for free and thus getting broad distribution. And we all know brands buy their way into publications as it is. Ever notice the number of articles written about the same companies that advertise in a publication? Come on, its already happening, let’s just be open about it. Clearly there needs to be a standards body with the leading publications helping to define some standards for how to denote a piece of content as paid content but I think this model works for all, in the same way that search ads are a win-win-win.

What do you think?