Commentary

Where's The WD-40?

This week I was sent two -- count 'em, 2 -- decks proposing more equitable compensation models for both publishers and their audiences. One was called Fairpay, one called Fairpress. Each aimed to allow the publisher and user to settle on the best method and proper levels of quid pro quo. 

Both are ingenious and well-intentioned. Neither has a prayer. Because: humans.

The other day, I was on Google News and clicked on a story from the Christian Science Monitor. I read the first paragraph, but when I clicked for more I ran into a pay curb. Not a pay wall, exactly, just a little low curb to step up on. It was a series of simple questions I was asked to answer -- or actually, only one of them -- before continuing.

I’m not sure what they were seeking. My data, I suppose, but apart from a cookie, it was hard for me to imagine what of value this exercise would generate. Anyway, I really wished to finish the article, but the Monitor first wanted to know if I enjoyed working on do-it-yourself projects.

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Here was my response: “Fuck it.”

There was no box to check for “Fuck it.” That’s just what I said to myself, or probably blurted aloud. Not because my DIY passions or indifference are too intimate to share, but because I at that moment was unwilling to move my mouse two inches to check a box in order to load some content I was fascinated with.  

That, friends, is what is called “friction.” Because it is human nature not to be bothered if bother can be avoided, It takes very little friction to stop a transaction, or any action, in its online tracks.

This bit of primal path-of-least-resistance following is probably the second-most important fact in determining the future of media in the Milky Way galaxy. The first fact is that advertising will never, ever, ever be what it once was -- namely the perfectly symbiotic and unbelievably lucrative yin to the content yang. That has to do with supply and demand, ad avoidance, fraud -- all of which I’ve been yammering about for more than a decade.

Notwithstanding the zillions that VCs are pouring into various ad-tech solutions, drilling for advertising -- barring five or six gushers from social distribution -- will yield mostly dry wells. What remains potentially feasible is the infrastructure for the broader attention economy. Netflix, Amazon, iTunes and -- hell -- cable have proven that people will pay cash on the barrelhead for content they value.

Many an online publication has tried to tap into the same willingness for a quid pro quo, from subscription-only to metered paywalls to freemium models, to free-with-registration data exchanges to you name it. Third parties -- among them Google Contributor, Kachingle, MediaPass and Blendle -- have tried to engineer other kinds of value-exchange platforms to replace the elusive, and decreasingly valuable, page “view.”

And every one of them has created friction. Questions to answer. Forms to fill out. Passwords to create (Must include at least one capital, one number, one non alpha-numeric symbol, one hieroglyph and one carbon hexagram with a covalent hydrogen bond) And because there is no standardized template, it must be done constantly -- distracting users from the very thing they’re trying to access.

Fuck that.

This must be dealt with. It’s not just that we’ve been trained to believe content is free. It’s that it takes less effort and expense to locate comparable free content than to sort out the means of compensation. Maybe it was just a low curb, but if it’s easier not to be given the third degree by Mary Baker Eddy over my home-improvement attitudes, away I go.

Publishers must recognize this. It is not enough to offer a solid value proposition. You have to make it light-switch easy to turn on.  And so to survive, they must:

1)  develop (or simply select) a secure app -- a software WD-40 -- to lubricate the process of procuring content a la carte or by subscription, whether for money, data, attention, preferences or any other commodity. It must be something the user can complete once and not have to bother with again.

2)  distribute it universally. The world must know it’s there and always be reminded it’s there. Like the stop sign, or the Underwriters Lab symbol on an electrical product, or Arianna Huffington.  

Yes, you may take some comfort in Netflix, iTunes and The New York Times. You may even say to yourself: “They seem to have overcome the friction.” Yep. They have. But I subscribe to Netflix. I use iTunes. I subscribe to The New York Times, and you, Senator Quayle, are no New York Times.

These are exceptions, based on their surpassing greatness. The rest of you have to accept reality, physics paradox though it may be: For publishing ever to regain its traction, the friction has to go.  

 

7 comments about "Where's The WD-40?".
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  1. Randall Tinfow from CLICK-VIDEO LLC, February 15, 2016 at 11:58 a.m.

    In this technically facile world friction free is easy.  The challenge is overcoming the inertia of a pipeline through which $60B/year of sustenance is flowing.  

  2. Michael Elling from IVP Capital, LLC, February 15, 2016 at 12:07 p.m.

    Bob, I haven't quite formulated it but after 25 years of studying communication and application markets I've noticed something akin to radioactive decay when it comes to UX. Something like an extra-step law of demand or ESLD.

    ESLD: if you add another step/delay to a process you lose half your addressable audience.  So 3 steps or delays means you end up with 1/8th or 12% of the original addressable market.

    Anything mobile that is surely true.  For a start-up that means 100% of their audience.  For entrenched providers that means customers who are on the brink of churning/disconnecting and first-time customers.  The decay rate is somewhat less for regular customers, but it is still there.

    This can be applied to UX', ad length, multi-device access, etc... Developers be warned!

  3. Neil Mahoney from Mahoney/Marketing, February 15, 2016 at 1:18 p.m.

    Amen brother.  I spent 30+ years in advertising & B2B magazine publishing.  Bring back printed media.  you don't get something for nothin.  Neil Mahoney

  4. Dean Fox from ScreenTwo LLC replied, February 15, 2016 at 4:57 p.m.

    Quite right, Neil.  I tend to visualize available content as a magazine rack, the kind you still see at an airport, or as a TV schedule in TV Guide.  As a consumer looking for content that interests me, I can view the available array of content in a display, and choose for myself which ones interest me now. I know and accept that whatever advertising appears within the content I choose is designed to inform someone like me on branded products or services that I should find interesting.

    The digital content landscape is dysfunctionally sequential, haphazard and occasionally fraudulent, preventing me from confidently making a choice from among what is available, based on my own mood and interests. In other words, it tends to be a crappy experience!

  5. Richard Reisman from Teleshuttle Corporation, February 15, 2016 at 5:47 p.m.

    As one developing a new pricing strategy called FairPay, this post is very relevant to me, and I agree that friction is one of the most critical success factors.

     

    However, we all learn to deal with a modest level of friction in life -- the trick is to minimize it, commensurate with the desire to get where we need to go.

     

    Clearly, it would be burdensome to consumers for many small publishers to implement FairPay (or any other new subscritpion pricing process) independently, with different setups. To address that:

    First, I expect FairPay to be implemented by large players like the Times or Netflix, or large aggregators like iTunes or Amazon or perhaps Blendle.  These are contexts where building a relationship that is maximally win-win for a maximum number of consumers is both worthwhile for consumers, and can lead to increased profits for providers.

     

    Second, as producers and consumers get to know one another and build a relationship (which establishes a reputation and builds value) the friction of FairPay will be reduced in both level and frequency. Tipping in a restaurant seems very complex when one first encounters the practice, but we soon learn to do a very complex multivariate calculation intuitively, as second nature (and the system will do the basic arithmetic for us).

     

    For access to content sources that may be new to me or of uncertain value, free/ad supported or soft/metered paywalls (freemium) makes sense as being frictionless up to the free limit.  But once an ongoing relationship is desired, and go beyond the "curb" of free limits, set price subscription plans are economically very inefficient, and leave many potentially desirable and profitable subscribers shut out, as outlined in my post "Beyond the Deadweight Loss of 'All You Can Eat' Subscriptions" (at http://bit.ly/1CA3cZm).

  6. Mark Paul from Mark Paul, February 15, 2016 at 7:38 p.m.

    It's the information superhighway, so let's go with a real superhighway analogy:

    I've registered my cars with the Illinois Tollway Authority, gave them access to my checking account, and made an initial deposit of, I think, $20. When I drive through a toll booth, the system deducts the price of the toll from my account, even if I left the magic device in the other car. When my deposit is low, the Authority dings my checking account for another $20. It even works across state lines, all the way to New York.

    It's been like 20 years since I started reading about micropayments. Why isn't there a similar system for publishers? How can it be that a bunch of state highway bureaucrats can figure this out from scratch and the combined talents in publishing and consumer banking can't even figure out how to adopt this existing model? 

    I too started seeing these strange surveys on the way to reading a simple news article. And my inbox is littered with insipid messages like today's e-mail from UPS that was nothing more than an offer to send me more e-mails from the local UPS store, with nothing to say about what the content of those e-mails might be. 

    Is there a business school course in how to annoy your customer? 

  7. Christopher Stephenson from OnWords, February 16, 2016 at 2:54 p.m.

    @Bob - have you seen Brave?  https://www.brave.com/#about  from the creator of Firefox.  

    Not an "app" per se, but a browser that offers protection and micropayment... seems like it meets your criteria for a workable solution.  


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