Freeloaders

(By Richard Holway 10.00pm 18th May 09) It is more than likely that 10,000 people will at least start to read this article. Everyone of those will read it for free. You might think that our revenue comes from the banner ads at the top and bottom of this website and email. But the revenues we get from that source are minimal. TechMarketView’s main revenue source is subscriptions to our paid-for research. UKHotviews is a highly effective marketing channel which cements our positioin as the key influencers on the UK scene. Our aim is that more and more of you will think ‘if UKHotviews is that good, we must have access to the really valuable stuff”. All I can say, looking at our ever-growing paid-for customer list, is that it must be working!

I say all this because something similar is happening on a much wider scale in the newspaper industry right now. For centuries, newspapers were printed. We bought them for a cover price although the main revenue source for the newspaper publishers was advertising. Then, really quite suddenly in the history of the media, along comes online content and the whole model gets turned on its head. Everyone expects online content to be free. That might have been OK if online advertising revenues had compensated. But they clearly do not. Total media advertising spend has slumped. Even online advertising revenues are being hit hard – for the first time ever it will decline in the US and UK this year.

I don’t know if I am typical, but I now read all the newspapers, like The Times and Telegraph, and magazines, like ComputerWeekly and Businessweek, online. I don’t pay a penny for that service and honestly can’t remember ever clicking on an advert. My only subscription is the FT and that is so I can search the archives. Today’s edition of the FT is free.

The business model is obviously unsustainable. Which is why News Corp is strongly tipped to bring in subscriptions for access to its titles online. I have very serious doubts that this will work. Well, it hasn’t worked for anyone else who has tried to make the move.

Which brings us back to the TechMarketView ‘model’. We won’t ask you to pay for UKHotviews because behind it we have something of huge value that we can sell to an ever increasing number of customers. UKHotviews is more that just a marketing channel. It’s the way we maintain our position as key influencers on the UK tech scene. People have always been prepared to pay for access to the views of influencers. But how can Rupert Murdoch replicate that?

For further debate on the issue of free or paid for online content see A want to break free in FT 18th May 09