Sooooooooo obvious
PM update: a central point I failed to make adequately is not that this is a problem with the Washington Post per se, the WaPo is a leader and an example and where it and the New York Times go and I am quite happy with the NYT's archives access all will follow. Even the Wall Street Journal is going to drop the pay wall soon.
Google announced Monday they intend to digitize any available newspaper content going back all 244 years to the dawn of the Republic in an effort to free information and content generated before the internet and increase search traffic and therefore associated ad revenue.
This is a brilliant idea and I hope the Washington Post embraces this concept and frees all the content in their online and offline archives for the world to see. This idea of Google's makes sense for three reasons, in order of direct benefit to the Washington Post Company:
1. It will boost ad revenue on the existing Washington Post online archives. Currently users can query the Washington Post archives directly from the site or from Google News Archives. Most everything dated before 2003 is just a preview with a link to a HighBeam Research order page, the internal Washington Post archives search does the same thing. In the current model I have to pay for both quanity and time access to archives; I pay some graduated amount that give me access to more and or longer access to archived information. I cannot hyper link to the archived pages once I have purchased them as they are protected links. I buy them, pull the quote out for the Curly R piece on which I am working and then PDF the page for my records.
There currently is no advertising on the Washington Post archives pages. Obviously I have no numbers here though based on the New York Times' experience I would hazard a guess that the models would be similar. Back in September 2007 the New York Times ended the TimesSelect program, a two year experiment that put opinion pieces, editorials and archives behind a pay wall, suscribers of the print Times got it for free, that is how I got hooked on the NYT, now we get the WaPo and NYT daily but I digress.
The Times disclosed that they had booked ten million dollars in revenue from TimesSelect which is a lot for what amounts to one percent of the daily paper and old news. However the bean counters at the Times, looking for a way to increase revenues in the face of cannibalizing operations figured out that that revenue number from pay wall subscriptions was not going to grow as fast as that of online advertising. So they dropped the pay wall and put ads on the archive pages.
That is a pretty compelling argument in that it reinvents the newspaper model: give away the product and charge advertisers to get to the readers; newspapers make money on ads, not newspaper stands.
I would like to have a sit down with the Washington Post's bean counters and go over these numbers, revenues from archives purchases and subscriptions and growth in revenues from online ads. Using targeted advertising techniques the Post easily could deliver relevant ads to me when I search on Dexter Manley sacks 1985. If the growth in ad revenues is outpacing the growth in paid archives then the Post is leaving money on the table.
2. Google will share some portion of the ad revenue generated by clickthroughs from archived news pages. The model goes like this: Google digitizes the content, or takes pre existing digitized content and indexes it against their world dominant algorithms. Keyword searches produce results with keyword related ads appearing on the results page. The user clicks through and if it is a Google hosted archive (as opposed to a link back to the newspaper's own archives site) there may be ads on the content pages as well. Users click through the ads and the advertiser is charged some clickthrough amount. Google collects this from the advertiser and sends a portion of it to the newspaper source of the content.
In this model the Post gets money for doing literally nothing more than granting Google access to Post archives. I still get my old news, the Post gets new revenue. The question for the Post here is what to do with the current archives model. An analysis similar to the one suggested in 1. above would be in order; in other words, once users can get archived Post stories for free from Google they would stop or drastically reduce usage of the pay service. In this case agreeing to particpate in this Google service would only make sense to the Post if the revenues from Google exceeded the revenues from the pay service.
3. Information wants to be free and the halo effect from opening the archives will engender good will in the reader community. The Washington Post has a chance to deliver on the promise of historical newspaper accounts of the world, newspapers are often called history's first draft, moving from the past two weeks worth of news (the Washington Post's current news search index is constrained only to the past two weeks) to anything and everything will increase the utility of the Post and cause more users to visit online. In an era of decreasing newspaper circulation and ad revenues this would be an embrace of news and media in the digital age, creating what amounts to an information utility where the ability to see, read and fact check everything is right there. As a result ad revenues from the main site would increase with the overall increase in online readers flocking to a suddenly more user friendly Washington Post.
What would this mean to the average Redskins fan? It would mean a heck of a lot more historical pieces by me and Rich Tandler and the other Redskins writers that cannot get out of the past, and more historical context for interpreting today's Redskins team. Our Redskins are almost 80 years old, we need to bring the past out in order to understand the present.
John Philip Sousa Washington Post March sheet music cover from here.
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