Making Online Pay

There's interesting news from Europe about online content and underlying business models along the free-to-paying continuum. Here are three of them

by Bruno Giussani

Daniel Schneidermann is launching an online TV show that will be the first in the world to be supported by its subscribers—rather than by advertising only.

Schneidermann is probably a nobody to most people outside of France, but in his own country he is a famous cultural critic who used to host a well-regarded media analysis TV show, Arrêt Sur Images, which translates as Freeze-Frame. This role as the watchdog's watchdog has gained him a broad following, as well as many enemies in newsrooms. Last June, under the pretext of implementing an overhaul to its program roster, France5 (a public channel) dropped the show. Within a month, 185,000 fans signed a protest petition.

More than 15,000 of those people (so far) have also put their money where their pens were and promised to pay €30 ($42) per year to subscribe to his new online show, @rretsurimages, which will start on Jan. 7, 2008. The subscription campaign continues for what will likely be a weekly show complemented by daily news, blogs, and a free general news section.

Schneidermann is not an easy character; he borders on cantankerous, but that comes with the job. And he does his job well, which is, of course, the core of his appeal: high-quality unique content. On the site arretsurimages.net, which currently is still little more than a blog, he recently has been dissecting the contortions of the French press trying not to pay too much attention to a letter photographed from a distance in the hands of President Nicolas Sarkozy. The letter looked like a love note, but that's not Schneidermann's subject. His focus is on how the media treated that picture—including why one paper published it only after having photoshopped out the text from the paper held by Sarkozy.

Free for a While

The London Financial Times is not ready to let go of the idea of making people pay for its online news and analysis. But it seems to have learned a lesson from the recent decision by The New York Times to terminate its TimesSelect premium content section.

The British business newspaper is trying to find a way to get subscriber money, and at the same time be sure that its content maintains the broadest possible impact. Starting in mid-October, the FT will introduce an innovative charging scheme: Articles and data will be free to users up to a total of 30 views a month. They will then be asked to subscribe for access to more material. If that doesn't sound particularly avant-garde, consider the motivation: The change would allow bloggers and news aggregators to link to material previously available only to subscribers.

Despite the $10 million or so that TimesSelect was bringing in, The New York Times had discovered a couple of major hidden costs of putting its best columnists behind a paying wall. Doing so reduced their chances of being found by search engines and online news aggregators (Netheads call that GoogleJuice) and kept them out of important portions of the public conversations, thus reducing their influence—and the influence of the newspaper. The FT is trying not to repeat the mistake.

Steal This CD

The music event of this season will be the release of rock band Radiohead's new album, In Rainbows. That's partly because of the music, from one of the world's most innovative bands, but also because of the way they're releasing it: They are giving it away.

In Rainbows will be available only via the band's Web site (inrainbows.com). Consumers place the digital files in their "shopping basket," and when they get to the payment page, there is a question mark listed as the price, and they're told, "it's up to you"—you name your own price, and it's totally acceptable for that price to be zero. (You can already pre-order. Downloads will be activated on Oct. 10.)