But what makes content worth paying for? Certainly part of the answer is what your interests are — whether you’re a fan of football, or the opera or old movies. But there’s more to it than that: Which content services create a really compelling experience for users and how have they done it? With that question in mind, we gave our media reporters—Robert Andrews, Laura Hazard Owen, Jeff John Roberts and Janko Roettgers—a hypothetical allowance of $100 and asked them to tell us how they’d spend it on digital content. Here’s what they said. Note: We offered the same $100 to Mathew Ingram, another of our media reporters — but he insisted he almost never pays for content and wouldn’t know what to spend the $100 on!

Robert Andrews

What: Spotify subscription (three months)

Cost: $30

Value proposition: Owning stuff is so last-millennium. Except when it comes to real estate, renting is now far better value. For the same cost of just three albums from iTunes Store, a Spotify subscription offers 18 million tracks, playable on multiple devices and in my car. Rental services will succeed with people who want to discover lots of great new music — but, for folks who like to play all their familiar favorite classics, download stores remain the key to music heaven.

What: Soma FM (recurring donation)

Cost: $2.99 per month

Gustav H

Value proposition: Music this good does not come free. With 25 niche channels of streams hand-picked by savvy curators, the pioneering online radio service, which began in 1999, sits proudly in my TuneIn app presets. It’s a sonic friend during my work day and a beacon of digital taste in a radio business that focuses ever more myopically on pop hits.

But founder Rusty Hodges’ refusal to sell advertising means only donations keep the lights on at Soma FM’s converted San Francisco warehouse-based business, which has had to fight royalty rate hikes several times and costs $40,000 per month.

What: Ancestry.co.uk subscription (three months)

Cost: £38.85 (US$62.71)

Value proposition: Facebook’s fine for “friends” in the here and now – but, to me, the next big thing is social networking with dead people. Ancestry lets me reacquaint myself with the family I never knew by creating genealogical profiles based on solid research. I can see the my connections to the deceased, complete with avatars, as though they were my historical “social graph.” Ancestry shows that when you appeal to consumers’ deeper emotions, you can make a mint from selling access to centuries-old content — birth certificates, censuses, military service records, newspaper archives, and more. Like Spotify, it cannily locks customers in by letting them build up trees they care deeply about, available only as long as they continue subscribing.

Laura Hazard Owen

What: New York Times Saturday-Sunday subscription (three months)

Cost: $39.60

Value proposition: Despite the debates over the future of newspapers and paywalls, I still think the NYT is the best overall news source out there and well worth paying for. Home delivery includes unlimited digital access across PCs and tablet and smartphone apps — a better deal than purchasing a digital-only plan, which is $0.99 for the first four weeks but $8.75 a week thereafter.

What: Next Issue subscription (for three months)

Cost: $29.98 (first month free)

Value proposition: This year I cut back on print subscriptions to save trees and money (and my apartment from a towering stack of unread mags). Next Issue lets me browse through up to 80 digital titles (like Wired, People, Bon Appetit, the New Yorker, Esquirer and New York), and provides access to back issues through iPad and Android apps. I’m not sure I’d want a Next Issue subscription indefinitely, but three months is enough time to test it out and see how much use I get from it. That said, I plan to be a lifelong print subscriber to The New Yorker.

What: Byliner Plus subscription (three months)

Cost: $7.99 (first 60 days free)

Value proposition: Byliner Plus offers access to dozens of Byliner Originals (e-singles) by authors like Mark Bittman, Ann Patchett and Margaret Atwood. They sell for $1.99 to $2.99 a pop in digital bookstores, and I’m usually intrigued by the topics, so this is a good way to read more longform journalism while saving a little money. There are other e-singles programs out there — Kindle Singles and Atavist, for example — but the combination of business model and variety of content is what intrigues me here. One caveat: Byliner Plus offers access to Byliner Originals through an HTML5 site — you can’t download them to an e-reader. However, you can save them for offline reading.

What: Eat Your Books subscription (three months)

Cost: $7.50

Value proposition: I have a giant print cookbook collection and I don’t make enough use of it. Eat Your Books lets me keep track of all the cookbooks I own on a virtual bookshelf and search their indexes online. If I want to make gingerbread cookies, for instance, I can just do a search for that phrase to see the recipes in books I already own, then go to the physical cookbook to make the cookies. Eat Your Books also indexes cooking magazines and blogs.

What: Worldreader donation

Cost: $14.93

Value proposition: Tis the season to give to others, so I’ll donate my final $14.93 to this nonprofit that brings Kindles and ebooks to children in sub-Saharan Africa. Worldreader is also digitizing many African books for the first time, and you can see all the titles here.

What will next year bring? Everyone loves to look into their crystal ball, and we’re no different. So here are our collective predictions for 2013, from books and video to newspapers and advertising.

This is one of a handful of pieces over the next week that looks at what’s coming down the road next year in the various sectors we cover.

Laura Owen

Jeff Roberts

Robert Andrews

Janko Roettgers

Mathew Ingram

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