Just read a great article at the Neiman Journalism Lab site about Google’s plans to help the content
industry. In a nutshell, the concept is to utilize Google’s Checkout,
their payment system, to enable publishers of news and other premium
content to both sell their content as part of subscriptions and/or via
micropayments. What caught my interest was the concept of allowing
multiple publishers to work together to offer subscriptions or premium
content together.
Could Google convince News Corp and say the New York Times Company to
work together to offer a “super subscription” to their publications
online and then divvy up the proceeds on a pre-agreed basis, much as
they do with advertisers and site publishers?
Maybe.
It would take a lot of work and a lot of convincing and negotiating
to get it right. Then, even if you could get these cats and dogs to
finally live in harmony, the question would arise as to whether or not
Google Checkout has enough users. RIght now, they don’t. Which would
mean most users would have to sign up for CheckOut. Would people go
through the process of signing up for Google Checkout in order to
participate in these “Super Publication Subscriptions?”
I don’t think they would. In fact, while its a great idea on Google’s
part, I think Google Checkout has more to gain than the publishers.
That said, this same approach could be a digital media nirvana to Amazon and its users.
Amazon has pretty much everyone’s credit card. They have a growing
user base for Kindle.They already sell digital video downloads and
rentals, as well as music. They even sell good old fashion magazine
and newspaper subscriptions.
They have the ability to create the path of least resistance for users to purchase and consume digital media.
I thought it was a good idea for media conglomerates to package all their digital assets
into subscription offers. Its a far better idea for a marketer like
Amazon to package cross company offerings into bigger and better
packages.
While their Kindle revenue shares, IMHO, are far too beneficial to
Amazon, if they can work out a fairer revenue share for Kindle
distribution, things could start to get very interesting.
Across all the digital assets that Amazon sells, the packaging and marketing options are endless.
Like the freemium approach? Package the USA Today, NY Times, Wall
Street Journal, Financial Times, Investors Business Daily into a single
price subscription for Kindle Delivery. Price it a big discount for
the first 30 days, with an automatic expansion to full subscriptions at
a price that is a discount to their individual subscriptions. With Free
Website Access included.
Want to make the bundle more attractive? Bundle in a movie download. A book delivered to Kindle. Music. Software.
When they come up with even better ideas, Im sure the Publishers,
Movie Distributors, Music Distributors, Software Vendors will be more
than happy to give you OEM prices if you commit to minimum quantities.
In fact, it could be even more interesting if Amazon took a
page from Google and allowed Marketers to bid on digital content to
include in subscriptions, product bundles or one off sales and then
market and resell them.
Think of the ecosystem of content sales that could be created if
Amazon (or EBay or Google) created a “wholesale” market for content
where marketers could bid on 100 annual Wall Street Journal
Subscriptions , 100 Downloads of the movie Wall Street, and 100 copies
of the book “Random Walk Down Wall Street” to be sold as “Graduation
Gifts for Business Majors”
Lame example, but you get the point.
In a world where the marginal cost of delivery of digital content is
almost zero, why not throw it out there to be bid on so that great
marketers can come up with great marketing and sales programs ?
Why not take those marketing and sales programs and offer them for
sale right on Amazon ? They already have a wholesale sales program
that leverages their marketing, order processing and physical
fulfillment advantage for 3rd parties. Why not create the same type of
program specifically for digital media and the same Amazon advantages,
as well as their cloud services to let anyone who wants to participate
quickly create a digital media store? This could be the ultimate
market for digital media.
It’s hard to find ways to sell content, particularly content in any
one silo, be it news, sports, business, etc. When you start looking at
how to package any digital content into products and letting the
market help set pricing, things could get very interesting very quickly.
Ebay allowed products to be aggregated and sold by anyone. Google
allowed anyone to quickly and easy buy advertising and reach a huge
audience. Both based on an auction system. An Amazon Media Market
could create a bourse that leveraged the vast amounts of creativity
out there to find new ways and models to sell digital media.
It certainly could not make things any worse.
(Image source: instablogimages.com)
