Stop the Presses: We Have a Solution
There has been much discussion about the death of newspapers and the general print news model. This industry has survived for a long time on advertising and want ads. For many newspapers, the want ads were dealt a final blow by Craigslist and its followers leaving only the display advertising portion of revenue left on the table.
To defend their territory, newspapers have been shaking the Google bushes and threatening to turn off Google’s ability to index their content (and thus direct searchers to it). Pay-for-content walls have been experimented with (most have not worked very well) and online versions have been built. While online versions capture traditional ad spend in an online form, the revenues still struggle to attain growth numbers that would make them successful alternatives to print. So what is a newspaper to do?
Enter Pay Per Call.
Pay Per Call has been around for a while, but in the recent two years it has seen an incredible growth with SMBs and local advertisers. The basic idea for Pay Per Call is that a service provider tracks inbound calls to an advertiser’s business and then charges the advertiser for the success completion of a quality phone call. Defining and managing what is “quality” is a bit of a fly in the ointment. A business may want to pay more for a call in their own area code or may not want to pay the same amount for a repeat caller. Some pay per call systems allow payment based on the length of the phone call (a problem when the caller has to listen to a 30 second voicemail before leaving a message) or more recently from companies like Yext, certain topics are present in a text-translated version of the call. Setting aside some of the difficulties in finding the right price for each phone call, consider how a newspaper could change their model.
Newspapers could include phone numbers for each of the advertisers (brand advertisers as well as classified advertisers) so they could track calls. To the end user (caller) this is a seamless activity. They talk directly to the company (not a middleman call center) and the pay per call provider simply sits in the middle. Rather than charging a fixed (and somewhat prohibitive cost) for a placement in the classifieds or ads the newspaper could charge the advertiser based on calls generated. In some instances this might vastly outperform the fixed fee of the advertisement based on the value of the call. It works because it shares risk. It also handles the secondary reader issue (e.g. each how many people pick up the same copy of the New York Times in a coffee shop on Sunday morning). I stopped using newspapers a long time ago because I just couldn’t justify the cost and the feeling that I bared all the risk here.
The same thing could be done with coupon codes or affiliatized links for websites (e.g. www.landsend.com/NYT would trigger an affiliate code). Let the newspaper participate in the sale from the customers they generate. This is just like an affiliate does on the web.
The affiliate world is only now reaching the mainstream. As more content gets created, and more links are generated on the web, websites big and small are learning that they can participate in the “referral economy” quite simply. In fact, I sit on the board of a company, VigLink, that automatically turns any blog’s or website’s links into affiliatized version of themselves. Just link to whatever you want, and we’ll do the rest. We’re trying to help anyone with content monetize it in new ways and affiliatization is a growing and powerful way to do this.
If newspapers started thinking of their pages from a monetization perspective much more like website owners did, they’d find all sorts of new ways to generate income. You don’t hear a lot of bloggers asking to shut down Google’s search engine indexes. Granted many of these bloggers don’t have full-time editorial staffs, but they do understand there are many ways to monetize content other than charging directly for it.
