Newspapers and other publishers are
realizing the value of selling something other than their primary
product to readers — and ebooks are leading the way.
...We’re on the brink of
news companies producing hundreds of products for sale each year. While
digital technology hath taketh (the easy ability to make money on news
distribution), digital technology also giveth back, with the ability to
create hundreds and thousands of newsy products at small incremental
costs. The bonus: News organizations will be able to satisfy groups of
readers and advertisers (often disguised thinly as sponsors) better than
ever before. Double bonus: The let-a-hundred-products-bloom revolution
fits neatly with the all-out embrace of all-access circulation
initiatives, which news companies in North America, Europe, and Asia now
can’t seem to implement quickly enough.
Can we call this the ebook revolution? Maybe, but that’s probably too
narrow. Delivery of new products to new audiences can take several
forms. A text-only ebook, a shinier iBooks-enabled product with video,
or an app with all the glorious functionality apps offer. It’s not the
form; it’s the content, content that satisfies niches rather than serves masses with one-size-fits-all newspaper or magazine products.Call it the newsonomics of 100 products a year, or just one way to envision a much bigger future.
The 100-product-a-year model is a much-needed growth model. We can see how it fits nicely with all-access subscriptions, and together we have two interconnected Lego blocks of a new sustainable news model. We have two essential parts of a crossover model (“The newsonomics of crossover”) that I detailed here a few weeks ago. The big, hairy challenges of accelerating print ad loss and onerous legacy costs remain, but at least we’ve got a couple of building blocks we didn’t have two years ago. By we, I mean those of us who care about news and great professional content.
Is it a big moneymaker? We don’t know yet, though we can extrapolate some numbers below.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/03/the-newsonomics-of-100-products-a-year/
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