This week is officially deemed paid content week (again), but yesterday unlike most weeks things happened. The New York Times said it was struggling to decide; Emap came out and (boldly) said it's charging £150; and a VC guy said newspapers need less than 5% of customers to pay. Bonus.Venture capitalist Dharmash Mistry, a former MD of Emap Consumer Media and Emap Performance, told MediaGuardian that national papers "need to convert less than 5% of web audience to pay model" for the whole thing to work in a move away from solely relying on advertising revenue.Dharmash Mistry, who is now at venture capital firm Balderton Capital, said that national newspapers need to get about 3% to 4% of their online audience to pay £3 a month. That would cover the entire annual digital advertising revenue he estimated most groups currently make."On a like-for-like basis, if newspapers convert an order of magnitude of 3% to 4% unique users to a pay model – at roughly £3 a month or 10% of the monthly price of buying print editions daily – you could probably generate as much in revenue as is being made from total online ad revenue currently," Mistry told MediaGuardian.Now less than 5% seems achievable doesn't it? Well, I think so, but the question is how is it achievable? What is the system that will most easily deliver you that cash? Is it micropayments, premium content areas, members clubs or subscriptions or, you know, something else entirely. It is this issue that has the newspaper industry acting like shot putters trying to do the 110 metre hurdles.No clearer was this illustrated than yesterday when the New York Times took it upon itself to air the internal struggle it has been having with the issue of paid content.Bill Keller, the executive editor, said yesterday that the issue of charging had proved a much tougher and more complicated decision "than it seems to all the armchair experts"."There is no clear consensus on the right way to go," Kellner said, but added that the paper was "within weeks of a decision".The New York Times has been looking at this for many months and it is finding it hard to know which way to jump. Getting it wrong could be a serious setback even for one of the world's biggest newspapers.What keeps newspaper executives awake at night is this: if you opt for one system, invest and roll it out and then find it doesn't work what do you do then? Answers in 140 characters to the usual address please.While one former Emap director was espousing; one newspaper wringing its hands; the B2B arm of Emap dived off a cliff. This might be for Emap a bold and elegant act, worthy of an Olympic podium place, or it might well be a rash act of folly more akin to tombstoning.This is what it has done as reported by Media Week: it will start introducing pay walls across its magazine websites, which include Drapers Record, Broadcast, Health Service Journal and Retail Week, within two weeks and will no longer giveaway online content. Wow.First at the plate is Retail Week. It will introduce a pay wall on November 13 with others likely to follow later. To be honest my feeling here is, and working for a rival B2B publisher I will try to be careful with my words, good luck with that one. I don't see a lot of reasons why much of its audience would pay much at all for the news driven content on its websites.So much of what is in Retail Week, Broadcast and the others exists elsewhere on the web. And while it covers these industries well, that isn't I think anything like enough to persuade people to pay £150 of thereabouts in this climate. I could, of course, be totally wrong, but it will be interesting to watch all the same.
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Gordon Macmillan
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