• Ross Fadner, May 18, 2009, 12:16 PM
  • When Pay Walls Aren't Enough International Herald Tribune Will 2009 be remembered as the last days for free content on the Internet? Perhaps, says the International Herald Tribune's Eric Pfanner, if Rupert Murdoch and his media mogul contemporaries have their way. Murdoch last week declared that he would personally end the "malfunctioning" of the newspaper business by charging for News Corp. content. Other media companies, like The New York Times Co., have said they are also looking at ways of charging readers for news content.

    Will the plan work? Unlikely, says Pfanner. He notes that even The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, two of the best examples of paid-for digital news, only generate a small fraction of their revenue from their online businesses.

    Does he have a better idea? Of course! If there's one thing the print industry should learn from the music industry, it's that pay walls aren't enough. Pfanner suggests that ISPs sit down with content providers and start coming up with package bundles they can sell to consumers as part of their Internet service subscriptions. That way, users could be charged for getting packages of content that they may (or may not) be interested in. Hmm ... sounds a bit too much like ... cable TV subscription packages. Read the whole story...
  • Scribd Opens Store for Web Publishers PaidContent.org Scribd, a document sharing site, is beginning a beta test of an ecommerce platform for Web publishers, in an effort to tap into news companies' increasing interest in charging consumers for digital content. According to PaidContent.org's David Kaplan, the startup believes that the rise of Amazon's Kindle has made the notion of buying texts online more acceptable. The document sharing company also plans to launch an iPhone app that lets publishers sell their content directly to iPhone users.

    Unlike Amazon's rev-sharing model for the Kindle, which takes as much as 70% of the revenue from some content providers, the new Scribd Store lets content providers keep 80% of the revenue. They will also be able to set their own prices and DRM options. Prices range from $1 for a novel to $5,000 for an in-depth market-research report on China, Kaplan says.

    "For the most part, there's a lot of work that's going to be uploaded, so we wanted to lower the barriers," Tammy Nam, Scribd's VP-content and marketing, said of the reasoning behind the pricing and DRM structure. "Our main objective is to get new content to the site. We think it's going to be a lot like eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) in a lot of ways, where you'll have a mix of amateur and professional content sellers. But in particular, as a site with 60 million monthly readers, we believe there is a huge long tail of non-professional content." Read the whole story...
  • Venture-Backed Companies Make Rare Public Offering The Wall Street Journal SolarWinds, a software maker, and OpenTable, an online reservation service, will be the first venture-backed IPOs in nine months, marking the end of a long dry spell for the IPO market for venture capital-backed deals, The Wall Street Journal reports.

    "There's no question people are going to be looking at how these entities fare over the next couple of months," said Mark G. Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association. Even so, most venture capitalists don't expect a meaningful pickup in IPOs this year or next, said Heesen. The Journal points out that few companies are waiting to go public, and no new ones have filed the necessary paperwork lately to start the process. In 2008, just seven venture-backed companies went public, raising a combined $550 million, down from 76 venture-backed IPOs in 2007 that raised a total of $6.8 billion, according to VentureSource, a research firm.

    Of the two, OpenTable's $42 million IPO prospects looks "shakier," The Journal says. The company may be ten years old, but the restaurant business is very exposed the recession. OpenTable's service provides real-time reservations for restaurants. As such, its financial performance has been "erratic", with operating losses in four of the last five years. Read the whole story...
  • Twitter Marketing a Boon for Local Businesses http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=136662 Naked Pizza is one of many small businesses that use Twitter as a marketing tool. In an Ad Age report, the company reveals that it recently brought in 15% of a day's business by running a promotion via Twitter. "Every phone call was tracked, every order was measured by where it came from, and it told us very quickly that Twitter is useful," said Jeff Leach, the restaurant's co-founder. The campaign targeted users who were within a three-mile radius of the restaurant. Leach says he even put up a billboard outside of his store publicizing Naked Pizza's Twitter handle.

    According to Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, which specializes in local-marketing, marketing via Twitter is "simpler than a blog, than setting up a Facebook or MySpace page." In fact, he says, "its very much like e-mail. And e-mail, from small-business standpoint, has been one of the most effective marketing tools."

    Factor in location-based technology on mobile devices, and "the reality is Twitter's got all sorts of business models available to it," says Twitter investor Todd Chaffee, general partner at Institutional Venture Partners. "We're putting together monetization framework, things like features for commercial accounts, which could be for global companies all the way down to local companies."

    One thing Naked Pizza says it could certainly use (and would be willing to pay for) is analytics tools, so it can understand the most effective time of the day or week to deliver promotional messages. Read the whole story...
  • Facebook Seeks $150 Million for Stock Repurchase PaidContent.org Read the whole story...
  • Micropayments Won't Save Journalism TechCrunch Read the whole story...
  • Microsoft vs. Google Health CNet Read the whole story...