Data from six months of Piano’s experiment has revealed that readers who decide to pay are not motivated by concern for access to specific content. Rather, they decide to pay because they want to be the kind of person who values intellectual work and pays for it, and because they like paying just once for access. “Some readers,” says Bella, “are even paying for the articles that are from the news agencies, which makes no sense because they can easily get them anywhere else. But the thing is, when it’s an easy payment, when it’s very convenient, and when it’s not a lot of money, it’s easier just to pay than to go looking elsewhere.” The fear that users will always flee a paywall and congregate wherever content is still free has not materialized in post-Piano Slovakia.
Piano’s subscribers are not even usually aware of what content is behind a paywall and what they can get for free on any given website. And they don’t decide to subscribe in a moment of frustration after being denied access. Most often, they make a reasoned decision to pay after a period of offline reflection. Says Bella, “they ask ‘Am I the kind of person that can appreciate intellectual work?’ That’s the level they make a decision on.”
Piano’s implementation may be novel, but what they are selling—curation and ease of access—is as old as the printed newspaper. A good chunk of Piano’s subscribers even signed up before the metered request function asked them to, Bella says. “We are basically selling peace of mind.”
Six months of detailed data from users has yielded some surprises for Piano and its clients. “What people are willing to pay for is very different from what publishers think is valuable,” says Bella. One of Piano’s clients discovered that their readers valued a bare bones, chronologically arranged list of articles. Another client found that readers cared a lot about the news summary. Editors in both cases had long put little value on those services, but have since made them more prominent on their sites.
Piano was surprised that some readers shied away from purchasing subscriptions because they were afraid of supporting publications in Piano’s network whose politics they disagreed with. Bella says those concerns dissipated after Piano explained how it splits up its profits: A third of each fee goes straight to Piano, a third goes to the site where a subscriber signs up, and the remaining third is divided up according to where a reader spends their time (with time spent in comment forums excluded). If a subscriber does not want to support a particular news organization, all they have to do is never visit its sites.
One benefit apparently enjoyed by both readers and publishers was not part of Piano’s initial vision—regulated comments. By limiting the number of free online comments subscribers can make, and by excluding non-subscribers from commenting at all, publishers believe that the level of Slovakia’s Internet discourse has been raised up a few notches. One news editor, happy to be free of the burden of comment moderation, said simply “All the idiots have left the forums!”
Piano’s success has depended on both understanding and changing the mindset of readers. But before they could tackle reader psychology, Bella and his team had what was arguably a tougher challenge: understanding and changing the mindset of news publishers.
Demoralized by decades of falling profits and the assumption that there was no way out of giving their product away for free, Slovak news publishers did not take easily to Bella’s plan. “Basically, the publishers said ‘Why the hell do you think this idea can work here? Why should Slovakia be the first country in the world where this works? Why haven’t the Americans thought of this before you?’”
But Bella persisted, realizing that he had an advantage over those putting up paywalls in other, bigger countries: a set of personal relationships with the entire news media establishment.
Finally. The appeal of a single, unified subscription for journalism sites is compelling to me... and I've been wondering why (other than narrow-mindedness) US news organizations haven't offered something like this.
Oh, and the regulation of online comments sounds absolutely wonderful. Don't we all wish to exclaim as did the editor quoted in the article, “All the idiots have left the forums!”
#1 Posted by Andrew Holtz, CJR on Tue 14 Feb 2012 at 02:40 PM
Well, I`m from Slovakia and I can honestly tell you Mr. Bella and his colleagues in Piano Media are probably the only ones who are convinced the project is a success. The most striking is that they simply fail to be transparent about the exact number of subscribers the service has garnered to this time. They repeatedly refused to publish the number citing some business tactics bullshit. They are not particularly trustworthy regarding communicating the necessity of paywall to web news consumers.
Also it is certainly not the truth, that after some months "online discussion about paywall ceased " and "the mindset of people changed quite a lot.” The paywall itself and the very principle of paying for reading news on the Internet is still matter of fierce discussion on the Slovak web. And I, as a quite heavy Internet user, can assure you the most frequent reaction I encounter is wholly negative. Obviously there are folks who are eager to pay, but the substantial majority will never accept this. They wish the publishers opt-out soon as they realize there are no promised benefits from the service. Their mindset is clear: Either you are able to offer news on the Internet for end-users for free ( funded by ads or anything ), or simply do not offer it at all and get out of space - there will always be free content fulfilling our needs.
#2 Posted by Richard, CJR on Tue 14 Feb 2012 at 10:45 PM
“Suddenly everybody knew that all of the Internet is not free anymore,” says Bella. “The mindset of people changed quite a lot.”
Robert McChesney sure is right on!
I think Bella meant the news. I hope not the internet!
#3 Posted by jjohnson, CJR on Wed 15 Feb 2012 at 10:41 AM
One would agree with Richard except he seems to have missed one point of Mr. Bella's argument: a lesson Piano has learned is the impetus for paying was never socio-economic but rather philosophical. Clearly Richard is on the side of “will not pay, will never pay” and that's fine.
He's also correct that a substantial majority of Slovak internet users will never pay. However it isn't the aim of Piano to get everyone to pay. The purpose of Piano is to get those people who value the news and who read it every day to support their newspaper or magazine of choice by using the Piano system.
While it's also true that there will be free content fulfilling the needs of readers, the majority of content on sites participating in the Piano system is free. Only content which is exclusive, that which the publisher has deemed exclusive and has taken time, effort and resources to produce, be it opinion, video, reportage or pod-casts, are paid for. The article mistakenly mentions that the Piano's system is metered; it's not. To read any locked article, a subscriber must pay. But for the content mentioned above, that doesn't seem unreasonable, does it?
Wishing publishers opt out will not make it happen. As a matter of fact in January two more publishers joined Piano's Slovak system and Petit Press, publisher of the biggest news portal in Slovakia (SME), added their regional publication Korzar into the system to reach the audience outside of Bratislava. This pretty much refutes Richard's argument that only Mr. Bella and his colleagues think the system a success. Further, eight major Slovene publishers joined the Piano system because they believe it works in Slovakia and will work for them. Although Piano doesn't reveal it's subscriber numbers publicly, publishers know them and are impressed enough to either join or add more content into the system.
Given the alternative of available subscription payments, Piano seems to be the most reasonable, both for the reader and the publisher. If Richard refuses to pay €4 per month (which is about two beers in a downtown bar), that's his prerogative, but plenty of people do and are quite happy with what they get for their money.
#4 Posted by David Brauchli, CJR on Wed 15 Feb 2012 at 01:28 PM
If Richard (see above) truly believes that “there will always be free content fulfilling our needs,” then I wonder why he is so upset about Piano’s paywall. If he can find news content that is up to his standards online for free, he need not trouble himself with Piano’s paywall, or the news organizations who are its clients.
The economics of journalism are simple: unless people are paid to expend the immense resources of time and money that it takes to produce quality, original reporting, such reporting will simply not be available. At the moment, online advertising is nowhere close to replacing the revenue streams once generated by its print equivalent. For news organizations to survive, other sources of revenue will have to be found, including charging online readers. Whether Piano succeeds or not, some form of online payment has to come along, or the news rooms of the world won’t be around for much longer, producing the content that Richard and so many other readers obviously value so highly.
#5 Posted by Evan, CJR on Wed 15 Feb 2012 at 01:55 PM
"Mr. Bella and his colleagues in Piano Media are probably the only ones who are convinced the project is a success. The most striking is that they simply fail to be transparent about the exact number of subscribers the service has garnered to this time. They repeatedly refused to publish the number citing some business tactics"
I second Richard's comment above. And Mr. William F. Baker's article mistakenly claims that Slovenia is a different case. According to the EU statistics, the Slovaks are among the top Europeans when it comes to knowing another language -- it is Czech in the Slovaks' case, which almost everyone understands (foreign movies are commonly shown dubbed into Czech in Slovakia), so the Slovaks A) have limited access only to some commentaries in the participating Slovak newspapers, n-o-t to "news" as the article claims (news is available for free even in the media that take part in Piano, and not all of them do); and B) have the access to the online media in the Czech Republic with a population of 10 million.
#6 Posted by Martin Votruba, CJR on Thu 16 Feb 2012 at 01:35 PM