One Stop Online Newspaper Viewing

Ok, here is another million dollar business plan for you. Same rules apply. Fat Knowledge gets the credit, you get the cash.

Problem:
Newspaper readerships are going down and people are shifting from reading print newspapers to reading them online. Free online versions of newspapers don't generate as much revenue as subscriptions to the physical version. Newspapers need a way to offset this revenue loss in order to maintain their staff and the quality of their service. Newspapers can charge for online subscriptions but the free content out there means that most people aren't willing to pay for access to most newspapers. People want access to articles from all newspapers in the US (primarily their local newspapers plus the national newspapers like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today) but they don't want to buy subscriptions to all of them as they don't have time to read all of the articles, all of the time.

Solution:
Give readers online access to the content of all US newspapers from a single website for a monthly fee (lets say $15).

While most people aren't willing to pay for access to a single newspaper online, if you bundle them all together the value proposition becomes much greater for the customer. They would now have access to the best articles written anywhere in the country every day. They wouldn't necessarily read more because they are limited by time (as I outlined in Time More Valuable Than Money in the Attention Economy) but the experience would be better as they now have a greater selection of articles to choose from.

As part of this plan, content from these newspaper websites would no longer be accessible for free. In order to view it you would now have to pay. By removing the free content, the value of the service is also increased. While this might sound unfair, charging create a revenue system for the newspapers so they can afford to pay for their reporters. By charging everyone who wants to view any newspaper a fee it will cause more people to sign up and therefore keep the price as low as possible for everyone. Free service could be given to schools and libraries for those who can't/don't want to pay. Newspapers could bundle this service (possibly for free) with a subscription to their physical newspaper.

There will likely still be free content from Yahoo and blogs (although blogs could easily be integrated into the system) but if the price is low enough, most people will opt for the greater selection and quality of the paid newspapers (just like there is free TV now but people pay for cable TV).

Here are some possible features for this website:
1) A single username/password to access all the newspapers
2) Article bookmarking, "digging" ability, and history of articles read
3) The ability to take notes on articles similar to Google Notebook
4) Ability to search all newspapers
5) Access to old articles
6) A listing of the most popular articles of the day
7) A Digg like function to find good articles from lesser known papers and give them a mass audience

Other site like keepmedia.com, questia.com and proquest.com have done something similar to this by aggregation content from multiple sources. But the first two don't give you access to NY Times or Wall Street Journal and the third doesn't really work for daily newspaper reading.

Why would newspapers go for this?

As The State of the Media reports, Newspaper circulations are going down. The top 50 papers in circulation lost 4.1% daily in 2005. Most younger readers are getting their news from the internet, mainly from free online newspaper sites. As Time sees the change:

On the one hand, newspapers are expected to supply their content free on the Web. On the other hand, their most profitable advertising--classifieds--is being lost to sites like Craigslist. And display advertising is close behind. Meanwhile, there is the blog terror: people are getting their understanding of the world from random lunatics riffing in their underwear, rather than professional journalists with standards and passports.

As The Economist explains an online viewer is not as valuable as a print one:

Vin Crosbie, of Digital Deliverance, a consulting firm, recently estimated that newspapers need between 20 and 100 readers online to make up for losing just one print reader. Many newspaper bosses would say this is too pessimistic: one British paper, for instance, reckons that one print reader is worth ten online.

The newspapers still need a way to pay for their journalists salaries when readers migrate to the web and this subscription based system provides it. They could offer online subscriptions to just their own newspaper, but the value proposition is better if they band together.

As newspapers switch from being distributed on physical paper to being read over the internet the underlying economics of their product changes. There is little extra cost for each additional viewer unlike the physical newspapers where you have costs for the paper, printing and delivery. It becomes very similar to a TV channel in that it is a digital product with low marginal cost. And just like the cable companies aggregate lots of TV channels together and sell them as as single subscription, so too should the newspapers.

I see revenue being split between newspapers based on page views. The revenue would be split up based on the percentage of online article views each newspaper had. This means the most popular newspapers would get the most revenue. Each paper could also have their own advertising on their pages.

This system makes sense for both subscribers and newspapers. The subscriber gets access to more articles and filtering systems that will allow them to find better articles to read. The newspapers have a revenue stream that will allow them to maintain their staffs and services as people migrate to the web. They will make more money by banding together than if they were to do in separately. There you have it, another million dollar idea courtesy of Fat Knowledge.