*openmargin dialogue

As you may have read, last week we went to RethinkingMedia. A conference where mostly Dutch people from the publishing world came together to answer one question: Who’s paying for the media? With the internet disrupting the publishing industry the current business-models don’t seem to work anymore so it’s time for something different.

So you can imagine my surprisal when talk after talk every presenter seemed to have either one of the following solutions:

1. Charge the user money for the content.
2. Bring in advertisers

Of course, these are exactly the same business-models media currently use! What these media are essentially trying to do is transferring their offline business model to the online world. Now I’m not saying people don’t want to pay for quality content or advertisers don’t want to advertise online, but you have to adjust to the online world. People have different expectations, they generally don’t want to pay for content when it’s freely available just a mouse-click away. Also, information is consumed in an entirely different way. Let’s say you want to share an article with a friend via Twitter, that’s not going to happen when your content is stuck behind a pay-wall. That means when story breaks, your article isn’t the one spreading on the internet, it’s the one that’s freely accessible. Charging people for content, means hiding it from people who don’t pay for it, which means very limited exposure. So is advertising the solution? I don’t know, it seems to be doing pretty well for most websites, but I’m not sure if it’s going to pay (all) the bills.

There were a few really innovative ideas as well though. Two presentations really stood out for me. Chris Thorpe talked about The Guardian’s OpenPlatform, which allows 3rd parties (e.g. you and me) to integrate The Guardian’s content in their own website for a fee. The Guardian calls this business-model co-monetising, a model where both The Guardian and the third party profit from re-using the paper’s content for different applications.

The other presentation was dubbed Living Stories in which Matt Thompsontalked about a way where news stories aren’t just a temporary report of current events anymore, but are managed in a more Wikipedia-like way. Stories are constantly being updated by the community, stories from other media are aggregated to form one Living Story which stays relevant.

All talks were recorded and can be found here. Keep in mind most of the talks are Dutch. The two presentations discussed above are both in English though (not sure if that means anything).