@pat, Yes, “ad staffs have killed newspapers with incompetence.”

If anything should be an upsell, it should be the newspaper. Old school newspaper people have been trying to shove squares into circles since the beginning. They are sticking the guns to their own heads.

@pat, I couldn’t agree more with your idea for classifieds. Free basic listing on the Web, upsell to print, and upsell features like extra photos.

I read Steve Yelvington all the time. The problem with your response is that you think some half-assed attempts in the past mean that we shouldn’t try something now.

Upselling means creating premium content that has value. Virtually everything that newspapers and news organizations produce today is not premium content. We cannot charge money for that, but that doesn’t mean we can’t charge money for premium content. Premium content is usually not journalism but rather services.

In fact, it is the very advertising departments that you cite as “upselling” that have failed newspapers so miserably. They do not know how to sell Web ads. Nor do they get the concept of targeted advertising.

Ad staffs have killed newspapers with incompetence. Why would I ask a season ad man about his past failings? Most ad people need to be replaced ASAP with people who know how to sell Web ads.

What Steve argues for is not charging for basic content. I’ve never seen him say we can’t charge for any content. I have seen very few news organizations that created original, PREMIUM content on the Web. The New York Times USED to charge money for BASIC content that was print centric. That was a terrible idea, and of course they no longer do it.

What I am calling for is creating value by creating new, Web-first content. This often means kick-ass business listings. It means creating a community for users, not just a news site.

Classifieds are not gone. Steve himself is working on a project to reinvent them. Craigslist does charge for some listings. This is how they make money. But the idea that we should charge for every listing is idiotic and only worked when newspapers were monopolies.

Newspapers need to adjust to a competitive landscape. Craigslist is not a great product. It’s beatable. But it’s only beatable by a substantially better product.

What I argue for is a free classified model like Craigslist that combines some paid features of Ebay. If you want to have a free listing, great we’ll hook you up. But if you want features like Ebay has with themes, bold titles, better search results, etc you’ll have to pay. And when I mean pay, I’m talking a few dollars, not the ridiculous amounts that newspapers used to charge for print.

Have you ever seen a newspaper attempt this? Of course not. It makes too much damn sense. I use Craigslist. I use Ebay. Do you? Newspapers have always half-assed the Web. Half-assing will continue to get them crushed, but if they really invest, they’ll have a chance at fighting back.

Weary (and anonymous) reader: if these are all truisms, then why aren’t media companies doing them? If upsell has been around for decades, then why don’t they apply this to online?

This post shows you know neither. It is a catalogue of truisms, which ignores the obvious:

– that subscription models work brilliantly for many media businesses, not so well for others. See Wall St Journal vs New York Times. Exercise: why do you think this is?
– that upselling is an advertising department staple that has been around decades. Ask any seasoned ad man. Exercise: don’t you think they tried this? What happened?
– that furious competition and cheap web publishing has made much of the “evergreen” and commercial content you talk about – restaurant reviews, local listings, directories, blogs – a commodity product. Exercise: do some Google searches on any metropolitan area in the Western world. Work out: what impact does this have on a content market?

Go read someone like Steve Yelvington. See if he’ll talk to you at a conference. Learn from him. Get some real world experience. Approach these difficult problems with humility, an understanding of history, and a knowledge of the present. Then blog.

You can see this model in print (albeit sparingly) with obituaries. Most papers list the deaths for free, but charge by the column-inch for a submitted write-up, photos and other luxuries. People balked at first when my newspaper switched to the free-paid system, but the number of paid obituaries hasn’t really dropped off.

In your Web business model, I see two minor issues, but the overall idea is strong.

One: People will pay a little extra money when they’re already shelling out a lot of cash (what’s another 50-100 dollars for an obit when you’re already paying thousands for the funeral?). But how do you entice people to open their wallets for the first time to spend money for a premium service? Free trials? Incessant marketing (like what ESPN does)? Either way, the content provided has to be terrific.

Two: What’s to stop someone from stealing your premium content, repackaging it, and sharing it for free on another site? Despite robust copyright laws, you know this is being done all over the Internet.

That said, a lot of newspaper companies are moving in this direction. My paper has a lot of the content you mentioned, but we’re not charging for it. (Maybe that will change.) A shameless plug: http://www.triangle.com/

Andrew M. Roman
Raleigh, N.C.