The Beer Is Not the Content: People Pay Premiums for Community All the Time
June 12, 2009 :: Joe LoongThere’s been a lot of chatter recently about Web properties resurrecting paywalls around content, ranging from the “definitely doing this” (ESPN The Magazine, a USA Today e-edition), the “possibly doing this” (TV & movie streaming service Hulu), to “nobody knows what the heck they’re doing” (secretive meetings by “newspaper cabals“)
There was also the countervailing sentiment, from folks nearly sunk by paywalls the last time around, as well as some more of the usual suspects.
I myself have little to add on the subject of paywalls, other than to repeat some truisms about paid content:
* It depends on your business. Porn, the Wall Street Journal, Carfax, iStockphoto, some subscription e-mail newsletters manage to do it — each warrants further investigation. Quality, exclusivity, timeliness, canonicity, access, legitimacy and authority all play into it, but there’s no universal secret sauce you can sprinkle on your content to make people pay.
* You need to balance what you give away and what you charge for, and you also have to make sure your stuff is accessible via search — even, as people keep rediscovering with the WSJ, if it opens you up to free riders. (It’s likely that many people who do the free workaround would never pay, anyway, and that at least some people who might use the workaround are just too lazy to do it and simply pay up, or value the content more because they pay for it.)
* Eventually, somebody, somewhere has to pay
The Beer Is Not the Content
Now, in my previous foray, “Can Communities of First-Run Fans Save Appointment Television?” I speculated on the role of community in getting people to pay premiums so they could be the first viewers of TV & movie content (allowing them to participate in discussions and also not be afraid of spoilers).
However, I was in a bar the other night, and I realized that there are plenty, much more accessible examples of people who pay premiums for community. They’re just not online — it’s called “Paying $5 for a draft beer in a bar when you can get a whole six-pack (or more, depending on your tastes and brand) for the same amount.”
Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, but you get the idea. In this case, the beer is not the content you’re paying for — it’s the access to the community of bar-goers. And it’s a heck of a premium.
So just what is it you’re paying for? Largely, the promise of something that we can describe any number of ways, but for the sake of propriety let’s just call it it “companionship.” At the very least, you usually don’t want to drink alone. Similarly, it’s why people hang out in coffee shops — to get a change of venue and context, to see and be seen, hear and be heard, to tap into a sense of activity.
So how does that translate to getting people to pay for stuff online? That’s a very good question, and I, uh, don’t have an answer for that just now. A piece of it is the driver behind online gaming, as demonstrated by MMORPGs and gaming networks like XBox Live, because you’re ostensibly paying for the gaming experience, though a big part of it is paying for access to the activity around which the community coalesces (even if a lot of that actual community activity occurs on third-party sites).
I will have to think about this some more, preferably after changing context and relocating to a bar somewhere. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts on this, please leave a comment below.
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