As we go full circle back to search it seems the content industry is going full circle reverting to the walled garden subscription approach.
In order to stem the loss of advertising revenue, the newspaper industry is beginning to revert back to charging for access to content. Rupert Murdoch says his News Corp owned newspaper web sites will begin charging users for access by the end of the year. The Wall Street Journal has been charging for its content for awhile and is now introducing a “micro-payments” model – which only charges readers for what they read. And in just a couple years after dropping TimesSelect, the New York Times is re-examining its subscription business model.
We’ve also seen the reiteration of this model on a much lesser scale as bloggers begin to put up walls to their content and membership models are popping up all over the place where members are granted access to exclusive content – generally in a learning environment.
So with the advertising prices falling and subscription models on the rise the makers of Clicky Web Analytics saw an interesting niche – a win/win situation to help content publishers monetize while creating value for the audience. They say they have built “the anti-ad platform”. Contenture is providing a white label – meaning you can use it on your own site – subscription model available to any content publisher regardless of the platform.
How does it work?
People want to support the sites they depend on. Contenture makes this possible. Contenture users pay into the system, their money is distributed to the Contenture-enabled sites that they visit. The more visits to a site, the bigger slice of the pie that site receives.
Sites automatically know that you are a part of Contenture when you visit them, and they take care of you. Since you are financially supporting that site, they might tack on an extra gigabyte of storage, pull the ads, give you access to the archives, etc. You get a better internet, and you are directly contributing only to the websites that you use.
What do you think? Will this model represent a new way to monetize content on the web? Or is it just the same walled garden approach with a different face?
Want more info on Contenture? Visit their website or follow them on Twitter.
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