STUDY: MOST U.S. NEWSPAPERS ALREADY SELL CONTENT ONLINE; SEEK EXPANDED OFFERINGS

To borrow from Andy Grove's book, "Only the Paranoid Survive," there is mounting evidence that the publishing and entertainment industries have reached an "inflection point." A year ago, we all commonly heard that information on the Internet would be free. Now some publishers say bluntly that's balderdash.

See, for example, the comments this week of J. Stewart Bryan III, president, chairman and CEO of Media General Inc., at the Editor & Publisher website.

Bryan says Media General will begin by year's end charging a subscription fee for some content at many of its 25 dailies, 100 weeklies and 25 TV stations. "We've come to the conclusion that [paid online subscription] is the model to follow," Bryan told E&P. "We've got to stop giving things away on the Web." He called the all-free model "dumb."

WHO IS CHARGING -- THE NEWS SO FAR

Napster is busy developing a way to charge subscribers for music. Sites such as Salon.COM, Britannica.COM, Variety.COM, Stephen Brill's Inside.COM and even Yahoo.COM have announced or implemented subscription or per-query charges to some or all of their content. Microsoft Corp. says its MSN portal will charge for premium services. The Times Co. Digital unit of The New York Times Co. is said to be prepping an array of paid products for its 15 million registered users. Its Boston.COM unit has already debuted a service charging Red Sox baseball fanatics for game and team insider insights. The most often-cited examples of websites which charge -- The Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports -- continue to report gradual gains in numbers of subscribers. We've assembled more examples of such thinking at http://www.clickshare.com/news/links.shtml.

Thinking what was once unthinkable -- that information which requires talented writers and editors to prepare should not be given away for free -- was rampant at last month's new-media summit at the University of California-Berkeley's journalism school. Speaker after speaker chronicled layoffs and dot-com shutdowns, and wondered aloud what revenue model would replace advertising and venture-capital dollars. It was as if the competitive impulse to create rich, free, content and head-off the other guy had given way to the realization that with that approach, everybody seems to lose in the end. (See: http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,42932,00.html)

"Take my money, please!" writes San Jose Mercury-News columnist Dan Gillmore in a column assessing the no-revenue web. Gillmore concludes that charging users something reasonable is a better alternative than dot-com oblivion.

John Zappe, who runs the new-media operation of MediaNews Group's Los Angeles-region newspapers, posted to Steve Outing's OnlineNews list on April 1 an ample helping of food for thought about the many ways newspapers can begin to think of themselves as delivering specialized information just when and how the customer wants its customized.

Wrote Zappe: "Advance delivery of classified content, especially employment and rentals in tight housing markets is such a candidate. So might be the answers to today's crossword puzzle. Getting access to newspaper death notices and editorial obituaries is a very high demand area for which individuals -- not only genealogists -- will pay a nominal fee. Local business statistics, particularly the micro-news that many newspapers routinely copy from public records, have an economic value. Into that same category falls other statistical data that we collect and publish, usually in highly abbreviated form."

What do you think is the answer for revenue-starved websites? We're interested in your thoughts. Email us at update@clickshare.com. And if you want to hear our thoughts, you can hear Nell Fields, our president, at Internet Content West in Los Angeles, June 4-6. HINT: (Save $200 by following that link)

STUDY FINDS CROSS-SECTION OF DAILIES ALREADY UNDERSTAND THE NEED TO CHARGE

So with all the buzz about find reasons to persuade lookers to become buyers, a just-released study is encouraging. It finds that many newspapers have already started charging for archives and other bits of content -- and many more are laying plans to begin doing so. What's help up the parade? First the inevitable argument that "everything's free, how can you compete". But newspapers have also been looking for an easy way to manage subscriptions and payments.

The study, financed in part by Clickshare Service Corp., can be obtained from its authors, Advanced Interactive Media Group, L.L.C. (AIM) at the URL: http://www.aimgroup.com/reports/. A brief news release about the study, with contact information, is posted elsewhere on Clickshare's website. More than 80 percent of some 70 newspapers contacted in the study said they were selling some form of content online. The research, conducted in January and early February, was designed to reach a cross section of the U.S. daily newspaper industry.

"Right now, most newspapers are offering very limited archives online and bringing in revenue that could best be described as anemic," said Mike Lawrence Blinder, AIM Group principal and director of the study. "However, we found a number of cases where newspapers were generating significant dollars - and we identified several strategies for newspapers to expand their content revenue."

Nell Fields, president of Clickshare, says findings of the independent study reveal that newspapers are taking a leadership position in the sale of online content. "It's fascinating, maybe even ironic, that one of the most tradition-bound industries, newspaper publishing, is leading the way in the sale of digital content. Until Clickshare, newspapers haven't had a way to leverage and extend their existing reader and customer relationships without losing control of those relationships, said Fields. "Newspapers can now achieve what no dot-com has been able to achieve: parlay existing content with the exciting new medium, resulting in a whole new, successful business model, with emphasis on 'successful'. The AIM study shows that savvy publishers are now focused on moving in this direction."

CLICKSHARE ALIGNS WITH WIRELESS BILLING SOLUTION PROVIDER TO OFFER M-COMMERCE SERVICES TO CELL-PHONE CUSTOMERS

Clickshare's transaction platform for privacy-protected digital content purchasing is now untethered. Infotech Solutions Corp., a leading provider of billing-software solutions for the wireless marketplace, announced March 26 an alliance with Clickshare. The complexity of tracking small transactions among many providers of goods is viewed by observers as a key impediment to rapid mobile-commerce (m-commerce) growth. The collaboration between Infotech and Clickshare now solves this by enabling users to make purchases securely, at the click of a key, while vendors receive compensation by easy aggregation of charges.
For details on the InfoTech relationship, see the news release at http://www.clickshare.com/news/.

CLICKSHARE IN THE NEWS

Clickshare debuted in the news in two important international venues since our last UPDATE report. We've provided links to these and other accounts on our website via http://www.clickshare.com/news/inthenews.shtml.

Following the "in-the-news" links, you'll find that on March 15, The Electronic Telegraph's Chloe Veltman's wrapup piece on alternative content-payment services described how Clickshare adds leverage to credit cards as well as customer relationships among websites which can link customers and content via Clickshare. On the same day, Simon Burns writing in the Far Eastern Economic Review (owned by Dow Jones & Co.), found there is little reason why sites should support non-paying, deadbeat surfers. "If you aren't deriving revenue from a customer, then that's not a customer, just a tyre-kicker [sic]," Burns quoted Clickshare as saying. "If they go away, don't worry, you're not losing a customer."

CLICKSHARE'S UNIQUE FEATURE? BEHIND-THE-SCENES WHOLESALING

Whether online or wireless, Clickshare's platform for sharing users and content is unique. In the past, words, music, movies and software had to be packaged in newspapers, books, tapes and disks before they could be distributed. Their form and context was fixed. Competitive advantage was sustained by mastering distribution.

With the Internet, digital content can be stored in pieces on a content-owner's server and distributed to consumers on-demand or assembled "just-in-time" in myriad customized retail packages. With digital distribution now a commodity service across the public networks, agents such as banks, publishers, entertainment companies, wireless and wire-line carriers and associations can user as the retailers, reselling information from the content-owning wholesalers.

The retailing site can add further value to content by finding it, sorting it, and packaging it in multiple ways, as a store stocks shelves of goods from wholesalers. But with Clickshare, the store inventory can stay on the wholesaler's website and be sold via the retailer when the user clicks on it.

Clickshare is the first company to identify this new approach to digital-content selling, and to develop a proprietary technology to enable it. The Clickshare Service can facilitate subscriptions, per-click charging, wholesale-retail, direct-selling relations and even management of user access to websites where purchasing isn't involved.

See our short topic on "The Battle", as well as they way we distinguish the need for distributed customer management from plain old billing.

Talk to you soon . . .