The Guardian first to innovate in online News
I have often related news companies to record companies. The two industries are very similar, and both have had to go through the digitisation of content. News media companies are now making the same mistake that the record companies made a decade earlier. That is, they are simply throwing their content online and assuming the same economics will apply as with the physical products. Well, record companies soon came to regret this assumption as free file sharing services sprung up like wildfire and stole the bread and butter right off their plate. Nowadays, it seems like all we ever hear of the record companies is what 45 year-old American mom they are suing for downloading music illegally.News companies are starting to bitch in similar ways. Rupert Murdoch, the CEO and founder of News Corp., famously stated that he was considering forcing Google to remove all of his news companies’ content from their search engine. He believed that Google was “stealing” his content and that he didn’t know how they were getting away with it. So as more and more news companies are starting to realise that simply monetizing online content through advertising isn’t sustainable, they are turning to putting up paywalls for online content. News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal has lead this charge, and The New York Times is going to follow suit in January of next year.If anybody believes that putting up a paywall is innovation, I beg you to reconsider. There is nothing innovative about it. It is boring, unimaginative, and potentially unsustainable unless all print subscribers switch to online subscriptions. The argument that once one news media company starts charging, the others will follow and consumers will have no choice but to pay, is fundamentally flawed. Those news companies who continue to monetize through advertising will see a tenfold increase in viewership because their content is free for consumers, which in turn will lead this to become a sustainable monetization option for those companies.What news companies need is exactly what they don’t have currently. Innovation, imagination and GenY’s views. Well, it turns out that The Guardian may have hit on the right option.The Guardian announced last Friday that they will be experimenting with a content syndication tool as part of their “Open Platform” initiative. It allows you to repost any of the Guardian’s content onto your own Wordpress blog, with some restrictions. These restrictions are that you cannot alter the content of the article (although you may add your own commentary), and you cannot alter the coding of the post. So, in essence, The Guardian is giving away its content for free to bloggers worldwide. Uh, wow?What’s genius about this is how The Guardian plans to monetize this initiative - embedded in the code of each post is an advert, which funnels revenue straight back to The Guardian.I’m sure as business and media savvy people, you all see the power of this?Quite simply, it allows The Guardian to have its content spread virally across the Internet. The Guardian doesn’t even have to do any of the work - they just keep creating content, and the bloggers will help to get it seen. The bloggers are willing to repost content because they can still monetize this content themselves with adverts displayed in other real estate on their blog. So it’s a unique win-win-win situation for The Guardian, bloggers, and consumers.This is the kind of innovation that the news media industry needs. It’s more than simply digitising content. It’s utilising the tools that make the Internet so unique and powerful, to everyone's advantage.