The entity will be reader-funded, whether via pay-per-news or subscriptions. The questions are: Will people pay? And Will it be easy?
A large customer-funded information business outside of the financial news domain has not yet been built. Even within finance, the Financial Times only makes 55% of its revenue from subscriptions and news-stand sales and is therefore still an ad-supported company. There are a few independent paid news sites: The Information is the best-known but extremely niche. Paid email newsletters have been around for years – Substack is the most recent one getting traction – but they are far from mass adoption. This means 21st Century Media will be a pioneer.
I am confident that people across income and interest segments will pay for something truly useful: ten years ago, I led the team that created a paid ‘iTunes store for SMS subscriptions’ under the MyToday brand, that included a variety of news, entertainment and sports ‘channels’ delivered via SMS. MyToday was the first application of a ‘digital services operator’ that the internet entrepreneur Rajesh Jain had conceived of. In an age before smartphones, cheap data and reliable payment gateways, we created a combination of online and offline payment methods for subscriptions priced aslow as INR 10 a month (then ~USD 0.2). The most motivated of our customers made sure their money reached us. Along with online payments we even received money orders, even cash, sent via post to our Bombay office. Scaling this was a problem and the board eventually shut it down, but there are many lessons to learn in 2020.
So intent is not an issue. In addition today, things have changed. Micropayments are now possible, at least in India and many other mobile-first societies with prepaid digital wallets and payment systems like UPI. In the West, with its credit-card-heavy systems, pay-per-view is a challenge and perhaps 21st Century Media will offer only subscriptions.
In the intermediate future, transaction costs for small-ticket-size cryptocurrency transfers will become possible. The Brave project with its combination of ad-blocking browser and payments token BAT is an early example of what could be. With payments in cryptocurrency, customer payments are natively written to a (public) blockchain.
We end as we began.
We live in an era of abundance of information and a glut of means to consume it. We also live in an era of great economic, political, environmental and social change brought on by technology, creating issues that are hard to understand but important to deal with. There have never been more demands made of our attention. In this era, news is critically important to provide data, help us convert it to information and add to our knowledge and judgement so we can not just respond to change but also thrive.
We have seen how the ecosystem of news in its current form cannot live up to these challenges – its interests are simply not aligned with its readers and viewers. Therefore, transforming news is not a matter of people or money or technology – it is one of new incentives and new systems. We need an entirely different news entity, born in technology and supported by its readers. This series has given us an idea of what 21st Century Media can and should look like.
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