@steveouting started a conversation of ideas about "what is premium content." There is so much great stuff there, I have summarized how I synthesis it. The insights seem to fall in three categories: CONSUMER FOCUS, DESIGN, TRANSACTION SYSTEM. I summarize the insights and pointed to our relevant posts so you can learn more about our thoughts. Because we are interested in connecting with other like minded folks interested in collaborating on a Platform as a Service for paid media. The timing is right.
CONSUMER FOCUS
Steve Outing: “We (news industry overall, and me in particular) need to
spend more time hanging out and talking with psychologists. I think
some of them, especially those also focused on technology, could teach
us a lot about what the media future will look like.”
By that you mean that you would benefit by approaching this problem with a focus on audience/consumer benefits? This is an important insight. And I think the post that inspired it has an important insight into the audience/consumer benefit to start with:
Derrick Burke: “We now live in a world where a young adult is often perfectly willing to pay $0.20 to text their counterpart information as banal as what they had for lunch, yet this same individual will balk at the idea of paying $0.10 for an investigative journalist’s report concerning undercover work in Afghanistan. . .”
Derrick’s insight is that Teens are willing to pay more to connect/stay connected with friends than for a professional news story. That’s a hurdle news can overcome by thinking about how news can help Teens connect to others.
According to a Northwestern University study on behalf of the Newspaper Association of America suggests that Teens still wish news on the web helped them form and share opinion: “They’d like to understand the news better, to understand the basics of what people are talking about and to be able to form their own opinions and perhaps talk about news. But they don’t know of any news sites that fit that bill.” pp.5, point 6
Forming and sharing opinion is a function that can contribute to people making connections.
Ironically, opinion is not inconsistent with the role of journalism, historically. Downie and Schudson, in the CJR report: “Reconstruction of Journalism,” say: “Most of what American newspapers did from the time that the first Amendment was ratified, in 1791, was to provide an outlet for opinion…” However, over the history of journalism, the importance of “forming and sharing opinion” to the newspaper content has evolved. Since the mid-1970’s the ratio of opinion-forming “hard news” to less controversial, advertiser-safe, stories shifted to the less controversial. Obviously, the importance of subscriptions to advertising revenues have also shifted to advertising.
Here’s more on journalism being in the opinion business not the news business, http://bit.ly/5JftZ.
DESIGN
This context of “opinion forming/sharing” to connect and form
community, offers a consumer benefit oriented framework to guide and
prioritize all the great ideas above, avoiding wasted time and money on
directionless experimentation. I’ve proposed that someone could keep
track of results, confidentially if preferred. I’ve offered to
volunteer my time to help since this information would help us refine
and develop a better product more quickly: http://bit.ly/4gDGAL
By the way Steve, your event idea is at the heart of our strategic thinking. We have experience producing both major events as well as large scale micro events, we have seen the value of the camaraderie and community that can only happen when events transform “me” to “we.” Ergo the name of our company is Comradity. See our thesis in the Prezi on our homepage here: http://www.comradity.com
TRANSACTION SYSTEM
I think that DocSearls and Crosbie Fitch and Derrick are on to
something. They are all pointing to the need for a two-way currency
system that accounts for both credits for contributions and debits for
consumption. I agree success also demands a frictionless way to
exchange the value of content creation, contribution by participation,
contribution by patronage, and pure consumption.
Here’s our post on a transaction/barter/syndication system: http://bit.ly/FqrZP. Also, we’ve written about our philosophy that we need a marketplace that raises the value of creativity instead of “using” creativity called, “New media is an opportunity to break the old media vicious cycle of using others to make money!” http://bit.ly/4dEcOP
Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you are interested in learning more. We do seek an engineer experienced with combining existing open source software, building Twitter or real time semantic search API’s, frictionless integration of transaction systems, Augmented Reality. Here’s my email: katherine (at) comradity.com
Katherine Warman Kern
@comradity
