July 03, 2000 New Thinking:
Content is expensive
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July 03, 2000
Content is expensive
By Gerry McGovern
Content may be king, but royalty is expensive to maintain, especially on the Internet.
“It was one of the early epiphanies of the Web: Imagine how much cheaper it would be to produce an online magazine,” Jennifer Greenstein wrote in The Standard recently. “Out would go print's most burdensome costs: the paper, the printing, mailing it to readers… But as one content site after another hits the financial skids, that epiphany has turned out to be an illusion.”
Every time I hear people using the word ‘free’ in association with the Internet, I can’t help humming those old rhythm and blues lines, “The best things in life are free / But you can give that to the birds and bees / I want money / That’s what I want.” Free has become a cheap word.
As Jerry Colonna, managing partner of respected Venture Capital firm Flatiron Partners states, “There are all sorts of advantages to being on the Web, but being cheaper isn't one of them."
The Internet is very often an environment where costs are displaced rather than reduced. Yes, online publishing eliminates expensive direct-mail operations. However, direct-mail is more than just getting the product to the customer. Direct mail makes life easier for the reader.
I need to make an active decision every time I want to go to a website. It’s not as much hassle as going into a shop, but it’s still a decision and action I must consciously make. In our time-starved world, these are decisions I can easily forget or not bother to make.
The direct result of the above situation is that online-only publications must spend very heavily on marketing to keep bringing their readers back. The Standard article found that online publications such as Salon and CBSMARKETWATCH.COM were spending over 50 percent of their budgets on marketing and advertising.
There are three other areas where costs for online publications tend to be higher than for print publications: technical, salaries and instant news. Large websites have significant technical demands and there is a constant need to innovate in order to deliver content to the reader in a more effective manner.
Salaries also tend to be higher for those working for an Internet publication. Online readers are very demanding. They expect that the website they visit will have immediate coverage of breaking stories. That’s an expensive process to manage.
Here are some things to do in reducing content costs on the Internet:
- Don’t create it, shape it. There is a huge quantity of content already on the Internet. Summarize it, quote it, editorialize on it, link to it, compare one view to another
- Seed your content throughout the network. Encourage other websites to use selected pieces of your content, making sure that there is a link back to your website
- Classify and multiply. People may search for a particular article under many different classifications. Make sure that that you thus organize your content under all its relevant classifications
- Use email. Remember, the reader has to go to a website, but if you get them to subscribe to an email publication you’ve got them hooked
Next issue:
Clutter versus clicking in Web design
Previous issue: Over-promising, under-delivering
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