According to AdAge, Youtube is going to be introducing paid channel subscriptions ranging from $1-5 per month. This unsurprising development highlights the increasing trend in paid content. Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish is another timely example.
The truth is, however, that the default expectation for quite some time will still be free content. Even as paid content proliferates across the web and with increasing velocity (which we believe it will) publishers will still be battling for a finite pool of consumer capital. Think about it, if all of the content you now consume suddenly costs $1 per month per site, how much would you actually pay for and which sites would get your money? The number will be different for everyone, but it is easy to see that the upper bounds will be reached pretty quickly and the websites with the most perceived value will get the cash. Therefore, most websites, if they want to keep their traffic numbers up, will continue to offer free content for most of, if not all parts of their websites.
In order to survive in this world where some can charge and some cannot, publishers are going to need to get smarter and smarter to stay alive. With a lack of innovative new business models, most publishers will have to work within existing monetization frameworks. Ben Elowitz got it right when he suggests a focus should be on audience development, but that is just part of the equation. A larger and better audience is important, but not sufficient. Time on site, repeat visits, etc. all matter a great deal. Up until now strategies for optimizing these metrics have more or less been “one size fits all”, given aggregated analytics data. However, to truly squeeze out all the potential value (as will be necessary) we need to dig deeper. No longer is optimization for 75% of your audience sufficient. The goal should be understanding every individual visitor and optimizing the experience FOR THEM and not for the group they are most statistically likely to fit in.
Despite the growing trend in paid content, most sites will be unable to charge and therefore will have to extract as much value as possible from current monetization strategies. In order to do so, the thinking must evolve beyond audience averages.