Information Squid

I was stopped on my walk home today by a gentleman who thought I looked like a person who reads newspapers. We had a friendly conversation:
Him: Do you get the Washington Post at home?
Me: No, I read it online.
Him: We have a new program where you can get a free home subscription to the Express [free tabloid sibling of the Post]….
Me: Sorry, not interested.
Him: If people don’t subscribe, there won’t be an online paper anymore.
Me: But there isn’t an online subscription.

I don’t want the physical version of the paper because I hate newsprint smudges and I like reading articles online (normal procedure: open lots of tabs, read through them in turn). And asking people to pay for online content doesn’t have a great track record (Slate subscriptions, TimesSelect, etc.), although some organizations have managed it (the Wall Street Journal, Salon Premium, the Financial Times, etc.). But there ought to be something else the Post could ask me besides “help us kill more trees to get our circulation numbers up.”

I have a lot of brand loyalty to the Post. I’ve been reading it pretty much daily since seventh grade, first my parents’ paper subscription and then online when I went to college. I’m used to the way its writers think – I know who writes the most entertaining Style stories (Monica Hesse), who consistently likes the opposite movies from me (Ann Hornaday), whose analysis I trust on the health care debate (Ezra Klein).

So why don’t I have a convenient way to support the Post that doesn’t involve acres of newsprint? I think they’re still stuck in a commercial model, and wish they’d adopt a bit of thinking from the nonprofit world – even if becoming a nonprofit isn’t the way they choose to go. I already see the benefits of their work, I’m a supporter, so let me participate in the mission. I can imagine seeing a message one day at the top of the homepage saying “Following our international stories? Support our foreign bureaus.” A couple of months after that, I’d see “Whether you love the Kennedy Center or the 9:30 Club, support our local arts coverage.” I’d give them $20 or $30 every so often, happily. That has to be better for them than the costs of delivering a free Express every weekday. It’s probably even better than my paying $1.50 a week for six months for weekdays plus Sunday home delivery of the Post.

The idea isn’t perfect. First, with advertising costs dependent on subscription numbers and online ads not nearly as lucrative as paper ones, my eyeballs aren’t as valuable as my blackened fingers. Second, it takes a good bit of effort to run an effective nonprofit fundraising program, and a for-profit fundraising program would require the same message crafting and analysis. Third, especially in a town where so many people are transient, my brand loyalty may be quite the exception.

But some of the blogs I read have Donate buttons in the sidebar, and if the blogger says “hey, I need help with my car repair / my hospital bill / getting to a conference” I’ll probably throw something into the kitty. At the moment the Post can’t figure out how to ask.

We have car dealerships, because you want to try driving a car before you buy it. We have mattress superstores, so you can lie on the bed before sleeping on it for the next five years. But apparently we’re killing off refrigerator displays in favor of online appliance shopping.

This is odd, because it seems computers are going the other way. Dell had taken over the world with online shopping and customization, but now retail is newly popular. Apple created its own boutiques (all white and shiny), which took off. Now even Microsoft is planning stores.

And it’s not just the branded stores that are doing well; Costco puts its displays of televisions, computers, and cameras at the very front of my local store. They’re interested enough in the electronics market to have recently announced a program for recycling your old electronics – presumably in hopes that you’ll use your Costco Cash Card trade-in money on a new toy to replace the old.

So if we like buying consumer electronics in stores (whether at Apple or at Costco), why are the refrigerators going away?

Apple’s and Costco’s big advantage is their selective product lines. Apple sells only a few configurations of computers. Costco picks a few products that it thinks will be popular and on which it can get volume discounts. The Sears website tells me “1033 products found for ‘refrigerator’.” How much space is that on the floor? How much space is that in warehouses? Isn’t it easier to tell people how wide the fridge will be and make them measure their own space to make sure it’ll fit?

It’s a do-it-yourself age. Shop online, base your decision on other consumers’ reviews, and check if your vendor has free return shipping. The best tip I learned when shopping for a TV was to cut out a piece of cardboard so you could see if the screen was actually the right size in your room. Now I’m starting to wonder if there’s a market for sets of plastic images of refrigerator insides. “Look, with this one you’d be the right height to see into all the shelves.”

Maybe virtual worlds or augmented reality can step into this gap. Maybe we’ll rely on architects and interior designers, who have memberships to professional showrooms that aren’t so decimated. Maybe someone will notice that people want to know whether the corner of the freezer door is going to hit them in the head, and a new boutique refrigerator store will be born. But it’s a good thing I’m not planning to design a kitchen soon: I’d want to pull open the appliance doors myself. Unlike my next computer, no one’s interested in helping me try a refrigerator out.

In these days of news organizations slowly and quickly and very quickly falling apart, I’m starting to catalogue types of reporting that really should be done by citizen media instead. Josh Korr at Publishing 2.0 thinks of scrapbook news; I’m leaning more toward inane trend stories.

Case in point: why did at least three major news sources decide today to publish stories about the Facebook 25 things meme? The New York Times, Time, and my local, normally-serious Washington Post all fell prey to this; anyone would think the meme had a gifted publicist. But how did I find out about two of the three stories? From a friend’s Facebook status. (The Post one I found on its website, in my daily “read the 15-25 stories I might care about” scan.)

I quite like the meme, as long as no one expects me to complete it – my friends’ random facts have been amusing (especially the 25 completely fictional “facts” one person shared). But if you care about the story, you know it’s happening because it’s on your news feed, and if it’s not on your news feed I can’t imagine you care about the story. So why spend precious journalistic resources on this? Is this the kind of content people will value enough to pay for?

Sure, it’s content that got me to write a blog post. And maybe that’s what newspapers and magazines value now. But eyeballs are one thing, and money to support your foreign bureaus is another, and I wish the people I rely on for news had a better idea how to keep delivering it.

Jeremiah Owyang (of Web Strategy by Jeremiah) comments on Twitter: “users dont want to pay fofr social networks. thus the need for monetizations…enter advertisements”.

Users don’t want to pay for anything, but that doesn’t mean nothing is ever paid for. Still, it’s particularly challenging to charge for social networks. They’re all scrambling for users, because the network effect ensures that larger networks will grow more quickly. Charging users reduces the number who’ll sign up, the number who’ll tell their friends to join, and your network’s attractiveness to potential acquirers.

So how can you charge for a social network? The usual way: you don’t have the most users, you have the most relevant users. It’s the same strategy used by business schools (a lot of whose value is in who you meet) and professional societies (where you can learn from others and be seen as a leader in your field). You’re paying to join a particular social network (in the offline sense) because the others in it are people you want to know. Oh, and there are some other benefits like classes, conferences, etc. The Well has had essentially this business model for years.

On the other hand, creating a network of most relevant people also works extremely well if you’re selling advertising. Look at ModelsHotel, a selective “gated community” for models from top agencies, profiled in the Wall Street Journal and then on TechCrunch in September. As the Journal says, “It’s this promise of exclusivity that is drawing sponsors to the site. Among its high-profile marketing partners: eccentric fashion design house Heatherette, Diesel jeans and luxury jeweler Piaget.”

So the upshot? Make your social network either big or specific, and specific is a whole lot easier to pull off. If you can get the right people to feel invested in your site, if you can grow a community, then yes, you can charge for access to that community. It’s up to you whether you charge the participants directly or take their time with (hopefully ever more relevant) ads – but I’m hoping in the current ad-a-minute glut that more places will opt to ask for my money instead of my eyeballs.

ETA: Jeremiah asks how much would you pay for a social networking service; Business Week discusses social networking with the elite.

ETA 2: Washington Post article says Online Networking Goes Small, and Sponsors Follow, 12/29/2007