When a user clicks on the News heading in their LinkedIn toolbar, they now get a splash screen that outlines the different categories or channels of news they can subscribe to. There are some fairly obvious examples such as Economy, Entrepreneurship and Leadership, as well as broader categories such as Healthcare, Technology and Social Media — and a few somewhat more unusual channels too, like “Things I Carry” and “My Best Career Mistake.”

Once you pick your categories, the site shows you a redesigned LinkedIn Today page that looks very much like the front page of a magazine website: there is one larger story with a big image at the top, and then smaller stories by category. But the biggest difference between a traditional magazine and LinkedIn’s offering is that the stories on LinkedIn Today come from everywhere — hundreds of different sites and publications, from Wired to the New York Times. In other words, the site is acting more like a Flipboard-style aggregator, which probably isn’t surprising since it recently bought Flipboard competitor Pulse.

Whether or not this is just another attempt by LinkedIn to make the site more “sticky” and get users to spend more time there, it has the potential to become a real competitor to other news aggregators and providers. As I mentioned in a recent post about why it would make sense for LinkedIn to buy Pulse, one of the tools the site has going for it is an understanding of a user’s “interest graph” as it pertains to their business and/or professional life. That’s a valuable commodity.

Under former Fortune magazine editor Dan Roth — who talked about LinkedIn’s media ambitions on a panel at our recent paidContent Live conference in New York — the company has been expanding its reach for some time, including the launch of the Influencer program. That involves bringing in prominent personalities like Sir Richard Branson and giving them a place to host their writing, something that is similar to what Evan Williams is trying to do with his new company Medium (although it is focused more on literary content).

LinkedIn may not have created a “massive media empire” — as one rather breathless piece posted (on LinkedIn Today, of course) described it — but there is no question the site has media-related ambitions, and it is following through on them. And its ability to target specific users based on their interest graph gives it a potentially powerful weapon that other media entities lack.

As Mutter (who likes to call himself the “Newsosaur”) puts it in his blog post, paywalls or subscription plans — which have been increasing in popularity to the point where a majority of the large papers in the United States now have them — seem like a great deal on the face of it. You put up a pay barrier, allow some leaks through social media, pick the number of pages that your pay “meter” accepts before triggering the demand for payment, and then sit back and let the extra revenue roll in. But as Mutter notes, it’s not quite that simple:

“All good? Not necessarily. The reason to worry about paywalls is that they severely limit the prospects of developing a wider audience for newspapers at a time publishers need – more than ever – to attract readers among the digitally native generations that represent a growing proportion of the adult population.”

Not everyone can be the New York Times

As an example, Mutter looks at the paywall put up by the Charleston Post and Courier, and how it increased revenues with only a small dropoff in circulation — in other words, a win-win as far as newspaper paywalls go. However, Mutter also notes that since the paywall was erected a year ago, the Post and Courier has only gained a small number of new readers: about 1.5 percent of its overall circulation. That’s verging on no growth whatsoever (Note: We’re going to be talking about paywalls and other forms of monetization at paidContent Live on April 17).

Although Mutter doesn’t mention it, someone is bound to point out that the New York Times has seen dramatically larger growth in the number of new digital subscribers: according to the Columbia Journalism Review, it has been seeing average increases of more than 10 percent every quarter. However, it’s also true — as the authors of the recent Columbia report on the future of “Post-Industrial Journalism” noted — that the NYT is an outlier in almost every sense of the term, and therefore isn’t a good benchmark for all papers.

Mutter, who does strategic consulting for media companies, says the 1.5-percent growth in circulation the Charleston Post and Courier has seen is about the average for the industry. That’s light-years away from what the NYT has experienced. And that’s one reason why I’ve described paywalls in the past as a “sandbag strategy” — they keep the water from coming in, but they don’t really do anything to help companies figure out or deal with the reasons why the water is rising in the first place. As Mutter notes:

“The modest take rate is worrisome, because it means that the Post and Courier, like most other papers, is not attracting nearly as many new digital readers as it needs to. Digital readership matters, because digital, not print, represents the future for newspapers (and most of the rest of the media, too). Unfortunately, newspapers so far have failed to attract a significant number of individuals who came of age in the digital age.”

Where do new readers come from?

The average age of a newspaper reader is currently somewhere around 57 — a survey conducted for the industry by Scarborough Research showed that more than two-thirds of readers are over the age of 45, Mutter says. While paywalls may be doing a great job of keeping those users from bolting to the web to read everything for free, and possibly of increasing print circulation (which is where a majority of newspaper revenue is still coming from), how do they help bring in new readers? The short answer is that they don’t, or at least not very many.

Paywalled papers have all kinds of tricks for trying to appeal to non-readers: the New York Times not only allows social-media links for free, but it and other papers also open up their paywalls for important stories like Hurricane Sandy. And some papers offer incentives — the recently launched hard paywall at the Orange County Register comes with free baseball tickets. But is that going to be enough to produce any kind of sustainable growth? And what happens to those papers if it isn’t?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Voronin76 and Flickr user jphilipg

In his post, Karp (who will be joining us at our paidContent Live conference on April 17) said that the idea behind the project was to create an editorial team of “experienced journalists and editors assigned to cover Tumblr as a living, breathing community” and to “tell the stories of Tumblr creators in a truly thoughtful way.” The Tumblr founder went on to say that:

“After hundreds of stories and videos… we couldn’t be happier with our team’s effort. And as Tumblr continues to evolve, we’ll always be experimenting with new ways to shine light on our creators [but] what we’ve accomplished with Storyboard has run its course for now, and our editorial team will be closing up shop and moving on. I want to personally thank them for their great work.”

The Storyboard team included Sky Dylan-Robbins, executive editor and former Newsweek/Daiy Beast staffer Jess Bennett — who posted on her own Tumblr that the group had “redefined journalism” and that she was “drunk on a plane” — editor-in-chief Chris Mohney and Christopher Price. A number of outlets wrote about Tumblr’s ambitions with the unit, which did what Mohney called “marketing as journalism.”

Although Tumblr has posted some fairly large traffic numbers, with more than 140 million unique visitors and 20 billion pageviews, the company has struggled to generate revenue — only recently launching an advertising program for its mobile app, after a long period of rejecting such money-making measures — and has promised that the network would be profitable this year.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Pinar Ozger

For skeptics, apps amount to a temporary — and increasingly unnecessary — technology. But this is hardly the only view. Many in the publishing
community still thinks apps will deliver on their initial potential to provide deep reader engagement and handsome ad revenues. Now, with the arrival of more tablets and smartphones than ever, the debate over apps becomes more acute: should publishers turn away and rely solely on HTML5 or instead double down on these new app opportunities?

These are some of the questions we’ll explore during “Are Apps or the Web the Future of Mobile Content?” one of many discussions that will take place during paidContent Live on April 17 in New York City. Our guests include Jason Pontin of MIT Technology Review, whose widely read 2012 essay made him a leading voice in the counter-revolution against app idealism. He will be joined by ESPN’s Ryan Spoon and Nick Alt of Vimeo – two mobile experts who offer other alternative app narratives.

Here are more of the topics we’lll be exploring during the panel (feel free to propose more in the comments below):

• Is the payoff worth the cost?: Apps are nice in theory but they cost a pretty penny to build and maintain – especially as the number of platforms grows. Is the return worth it? Or should publishers plow that money into other parts of their editorial operation?

• Platform proliferation: The initial promise of apps appeared brightest on Apple’s iPad. But now dozens of tablets, from the Galaxy to the Kindle Fire, are emerging – and consumers are finally picking them up. Do all these new screens present a new opportunity? Or another reason to escape apps once and for all?

• Nice app, where do I find it? Those who want to wash their hands of apps are faced with a powerful counter-argument: You need to be where your readers are. As the mobile market grows, are the app skeptics confident their readers will find them on the mobile web?

• Does sub-compact change the app game? The arrival of so-called sub-compact publishing offers a way to create light-weight and relatively inexpensive apps. Examples like Marco Arment’s The Magazine and The Awl also show how these new species of apps can deliver both a beautiful reading experience and an ongoing stream of subscription revenue. Do these offer an opportunity that the mobile web cannot?

With this podcast, we’re at Inception-level “indie”: talking with indie filmmakers who used indie financing distribution to make a film about indie game developers.

If you like this chat, then you’ll definitely want to attend paidContent LIVE, happening in New York City on April 17.

(Download the Indie Game podcast)

Subscribe to RSS

iTunes

Stitcher Radio

The monthly option is set up to renew automatically, meaning Sullivan is poised to receive thousands of small but steady revenue streams — it seems a good bet the renewal rate will be high since few people will blanche at $2 charge on their credit card.

“The point of course is to make this available to as many people at as many price points as you want and need, above a minimum baseline,” Sullivan wrote in a blog post. (He’ll be speaking more about The Dish’s payment model on April 17 at paidContent Live in New York.)

Last week, The Dish made its paywall stricter, lowering it to five free “read-on” stories every 60 days.

Sullivan also wrote that The Dish has now raised $653,000 of the $900,000 it needs for its first year, up from $644,000 last week.

The most obvious appeal of a purchase like Summly is that Yahoo gets access to a brilliant and charismatic young programmer in founder Nick D’Aloisio, who started the company in Britain when he was just 15. Om met D’Aloisio in Berlin and did an interview with him about the concept behind Summly not long after the teen launched his startup, and described how far ahead he was of many of his much more experienced peers. If nothing else, D’Aloisio might inject some fresh thinking into Yahoo, something it desperately needs.

Nick D’Aloisio

It’s not just fresh thinking about content or design either: while it may not be a blockbuster success story like Instagram or SnapChat, part of what made Summly interesting is that it was an attempt to rethink how we consume content on a mobile device. Circa, which is funded by Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh (and is part of our startup showcase at paidContent Live in April) is another startup focused on the same problem: how does news content need to be rethought for mobile?

Yahoo News may be far from cutting edge, but it still pulls in a fairly large audience — far larger than Google News. If Yahoo can use D’Aloisio and Summly’s algorithms to figure out how to take advantage of that on a mobile device, it could potentially have a winner on its hands. Google has done virtually nothing to optimize its news-reading experience for mobile, and efforts at recommendation or curation apps like Currents have mostly fallen flat.

According to an All Things Digital report, Yahoo may have paid as much as $30 million — primarily in cash — for Summly. That’s a lot for an app that only racked up about a million downloads and hasn’t really taken off in terms of readership, but for Mayer it theoretically accomplishes two important things: it shows that the company is intent on figuring out how content works on mobile, and it sends a message that Yahoo is willing to make acquisitions and bring in new talent in order to fix itself. Whether those efforts work, of course, remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Getty Images / Chris Jackson

So the New York Times, for example, is going through the same kind of uncertainty and upheaval as the rest of the industry – having to lay off staff, cutting costs, selling assets. But while the paper’s paywall and other measures may not totally fill the gap caused by erosion of advertising revenue, the NYT has enough resources to not only survive but do well. Likewise, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal will probably survive and prosper, along with some other large brands.

Some prominent journalism brands will likely be fine

This is exactly why Shirky and his coauthors on the recent “Post-Industrial Journalism” report from Columbia specifically excluded any discussion of the Times from their analysis of the future of journalism. As Shirky described it, it’s like the average driver measuring themselves by looking at someone who races on the Formula One circuit. Practically speaking, there are very few meaningful lessons other newspapers can learn from the New York Times.

That’s one end of the barbell. The other end is the ultra-small, hyper-local newspaper – the daily or even weekly broadsheet that serves a small town or region, where the disruptive forces of the Web haven’t made themselves felt as strongly and local shopping flyers are probably still a pretty good business. This is the kind of newspaper that billionaire Warren Buffett is buying up – the kind that still has a lock on a local market. Paywalls may work well here because of the lack of compelling alternatives.

And what’s in the middle? Everything else – medium-sized papers like the Miami Herald or the San Francisco Chronicle or the Boston Globe, as well as most of the larger metro papers like the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. What does their future look like?

Many of these papers have been trying to make paywalls work, but for most the results appear to be fairly lackluster at best – even the Boston Globe, which is far from the worst newspaper in a medium sized market, has attracted just 28,000 subscribers after more than a year. Its owner the New York Times has put it up for sale and may get less than $100 million for it, and that’s after removing the single most damaging part of the business from the equation – namely, the paper’s $200 million or so in pension obligations.

What happens to the news that doesn’t pay?

Those pension obligations are one of the biggest mill-stones around the neck of traditional media entities. And the bottom line is that even with some reader support, as Rosen and I discussed, these papers are going to have to shrink dramatically or come up with new forms of revenue, which is why the Washington Post is experimenting with what has come to be known as “sponsored content” (something we’ll be talking about more at paidContent Live on April 17)

In a recent post at Slate, writer Matt Yglesias responded to the somewhat fatalistic tone of coverage around the recent Pew report on the state of the media by arguing that as news consumers, we are better off now than we have ever been, thanks to social media and other forces. And it is easy to see how that is the case for certain topics and certain parts of the world – but as Dan Mitchell pointed out in a rebuttal to Yglesias, it isn’t the case for much local coverage of things like municipal affairs and public-policy topics.

So what happens to that kind of coverage as newspapers shrink and even die? If all the things that have subsidized that kind of journalism have been removed – the car ads and travel writing and so on – all these papers are left with is the kind of content that advertisers aren’t interested in and readers don’t want to pay for. What then? ProPublica and the Texas Tribune are interesting publicly supported models, but how scalable are they? Is every state or region going to have one?

Will some form of “citizen journalism” be able to fill this gap – whether it’s local bloggers or some kind of automated Twitter feed etc.? Perhaps. Will newspapers use outsourced services like Journatic or even robot journalists like Narrative Science? In all likelihood it will be a combination of all of these, and possibly other things we haven’t even thought of yet. At this point, the answers are a whole lot murkier than the questions.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly and Jan-Arief Purwanto

The driving force behind both of these phenomena should be fairly obvious: the media industry is desperate to find new sources of revenue.

That the Washington Post has finally seen fit to erect a paywall — albeit a very leaky one, as my colleague Jeff Roberts has pointed out — makes this point better than almost any other, since the newspaper’s chairman and CEO Don Graham has been vocal in the past about his opposition to such an idea, and so has the paper’s publisher, his niece Katharine Weymouth. As the Columbia Journalism Review has noted, however, the Post’s business is disintegrating fairly rapidly, giving it relatively few options.

Everyone is searching for new revenue options

This isn’t unique to the Washington Post, by any means. It’s a dilemma that almost every media entity, large or small — both digital and non-digital — is struggling with, as advertising continues to decline and no new source of revenue has emerged to take its place. And that’s one of the key questions were are going to be discussing at paidContent Live in New York on April 17, through a variety of panels. What is the best way (if there is a single best way) for publishers to monetize their content?

Is it better to erect a paywall and base your future on a reader-driven subscription model, as many newspapers are doing — and as some individuals such as Andrew Sullivan are also doing? Or should publishers rely on what has always been the core of their business model, namely advertising, and find new ways of delivering that value to brands?

Newer digital-native publishers such as BuzzFeed are pinning their revenue hopes on sponsored content and other forms of “native” advertising, in which the site creates content that is indistinguishable from its regular content (apart from the name of the brand sponsoring it). While this seems to work well for an entertainment-focused site like BuzzFeed — which is introducing its own sponsored-content advertising network for other sites, according to a report in Ad Week — it has been a somewhat rockier road for more traditional publishers such as The Atlantic.

On one of our panels at paidContent Live, we have News Corp. executive Raju Narisetti — who not only works for the owner of one of the premier examples of a paywall in action, the Wall Street Journal, but previously worked for the Washington Post, and has also spoken in the past about his enthusiasm for what he calls a “reverse paywall” approach, in which loyal readers are given rewards for their loyalty instead of being asked to pay more for the privilege, which is the way that most paywalls typically work.

What is the best monetization method?

We also have Justin Smith, president of Atlantic Media, which publishes a magazine with a 160-year history, but has also been at the forefront of experimentation with new revenue models online — including real-world events, as well as sponsored content. A recent episode involving a sponsored piece about Scientology, however, led to a firestorm of criticism, including a comment from widely-followed media theorist Clay Shirky that “we don’t trust The Atlantic as much as we used to.” The company later changed its policies around how it handles such content as a result of the uproar.

Major League Baseball CEO Bob Bowman will also be joining us, since the MLB is a company that has become a powerful content producer in its own right — and in fact was earlier to the digital evolution of content than many content companies — and has used a paywall and mobile apps to great success as a way of monetizing that content. Are there lessons baseball can teach other content companies? We’re going to find out.

No one can claim to have all the answers to the future of the media business — not the largest traditional media player, nor the smallest and most innovative startup. All we really have are some very interesting questions, and we hope some of you can join us in that discussion on April 17 in New York. You can find more details about paidContent Live, including a link to register, on our event page.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Eldorado3D

Pay TV providers have long complained that TV networks force them to carry channels they don’t want. But in recent weeks, those complaints have turned into action, with Cablevision suing Viacom to break up the network’s bundle, and Verizon starting to talk about paying programmers based on their performance, as opposed to a flat fee for a bundle of channels.

So who is trying to break up the bundle, and how? Check out our list:

Verizon: Putting its money where your eyes are

Verizon execs have been talking for some time about changing things up, to the point where director of consumer video services Maitreyi Krishnaswamy, who is responsible for the company’s FIOS TV service, said last year that cord cutting wasn’t growing fast enough for the company. The logic behind those remarks? If consumers cut the cord, then programmers are going to be more willing to rethink the deals they’re having with Verizon.

Verizon sells bundles – but it would like to change them.

Looks like this is now beginning to happen, at least on a smaller scale. The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that Verizon is pressing smaller channels to pay them based on their actual performance, as opposed to a flat fee per subscriber. The result wouldn’t actually be a pick-and-choose TV lineup. Instead, Verizon would potentially distribute even more channels — but only pay the ones that are actually attracting eyeballs.

Making this model work won’t be easy for Verizon, especially when it comes to the biggest cost drivers, which are sports channels like ESPN. But some smaller channels might be eager to sign on. This could potentially lead to some cheaper bundles that offer actually more content, save for some of the most expensive fare.

Cablevision: Suing to get rid of the duds

Cablevision has chosen to take its attack on the big bundles to the courts: The company sued Viacom last month to get out of a contract it struck just two months earlier, arguing that Viacom is forcing the company to carry a number of channels its customers don’t want. The lawsuit is about a total of 12 channels like MTV Hits and VH1 Classic, but it could ultimately threaten the whole concept of a bundle — which is why it will likely get settled out of court.

Aereo: A new kind of bundle

Aereo is circumventing the cable bundle altogether with an offer that’s squarely aimed at cord cutters: The company offers streaming of broadcast networks like ABC, CBS and NBC for as little as $8 a month.

Aereo’s tiny antennas could have a big impact on bundles.

It’s undercutting the cable companies through the use of a legal loophole, which involves an elaborate setup of miniature antenna farms, and resulted in a lawsuit brought against the company by those very broadcasters. However, the company won a first round last year, and is now looking to expand to close to two dozen cities this spring.

To learn more about Aereo and the company’s take on the future of television, check out our upcoming paidContent Live conference, where I’m going to chat with the company’s CEO Chet Kanojia about these very issues.

Boxee: Unbundling the DVR

Boxee’s new Boxee TV device comes with a promising proposition: The device won’t just let you watch major broadcast networks without paying for cable, it will also upload any show airing on those networks to a cloud DVR with unlimited storage and streams them not only to your TV, but also to your iPad or computer. Boxee’s cloud DVR is currently only available in limited markets, and the device itself has been met with mixed reviews – but the idea behind it is definitely disruptive, because it’s essentially TV Everywhere without the expensive cable price tag.

Netflix: Showing that you can succeed without a bundle

Netflix has long shied away from discussions around cord cutting and cable bundles, with execs insisting that that wants to be complementary to cable, and that it will eventually just be another channel that consumers subscribe to, just like HBO.

Netflix’s House of Cards is like a cable show, but without a cable bundle.

However, the big difference is that you can only get HBO as part of a premium cable bundle. Netflix, on the other hand, is available to anyone, no matter whether they pay $50, $120 or nothing at all for cable.

That strategy has been working well for the company: Not only does Netflix now have 33 million subscribers, investors have also given the company a thumbs-up on its original content strategy, with stock roughly doubling since the beginning of the year.  And with new, original shows about to debut on Netflix every month this spring, the company seems to demonstrate HBO that you can, in fact, succeed without being part of a bundle.

Image courtesy of Flickr user HarshPatel;Photographer.