The pay wall in many shipping media titles will fall, but only after a few things happen
By Ryan Skinner (email)
Much good online news is free. News pundits argue that it will stay that way. Then why is so little content from the top shipping titles available free online? Why do they bury their news like some paranoid squirrel under what is called the pay wall - the online subscription barrier?
For the time being, these titles argue that they couldn't abandon the pay wall if they wanted to. And, in many cases and among many editors, they probably do want to, in order to build their readership. Revenue from web advertising just doesn't cover the cost of keeping a modern news organisation afloat.
That isn't the whole story. Given a little trust in the market and aggressive marketing on the part of these newspapers and advertisers, the pay wall will fall. In fact, it must.
The key to this whole equation is, of course, to get other revenue streams up to a sufficient level to cover a much greater proportion of editorial costs. Online advertising is perhaps the biggest factor in this equation.
Today, advertisements on online editions of TradeWinds, Fairplay and Lloyd's List (to name three big examples, with pay walls) are largely cheap, small and boring, compared to their print counterparts, and even compared to their mass media counterparts. This is not all their fault, as the advertisers of shipping are hardly pushing the envelope.
The fact is that both the advertisers and the publications have so much to gain from a rapid evolution of online advertising that it seems practically inevitable.
Online ads have one major advantage to print ads; you can measure and assess them. In the simplest sense, advertisers can use data from click-through on their banners to iterate their efforts and evolve new ads and spots that better hit their target group. More advanced users map out how online advertisements generate leads and sales contacts on down to new business. For B2B ship suppliers, even one sale is enough to finance quite a few banner ads.
But for advertisers to even begin to see this value, they need the metrics. This is where many shipping titles fail them. One or two offer a full campaign report, with page viewings, unique visitors and click-throughs, with a full geographical and statistical breakdown. The others offer little to nothing. One has even told us: "You should just measure it yourselves." That is a gross and embarrassing capitulation.
With metrics, advertisers will more easily be able to see the value and potential in online advertising, and make the investments to realise it . These advertisers' desire for ever greater readership (page viewings, unique visitors and click-through) will get the first bricks of the pay wall to tumble, as the publishers can trade subscription revenue for higher ad sales.
It is in nobody's interest to maintain a pay wall. The argument that trade magazines' industry backers can support it is only a weak prop, and time will show that they neither can nor will. And the recent announcement that some major US and UK titles are going from free back to a pay-wall set-up is probably reactionary and short-lived, and nonetheless exclusive to those particularly well-established business titles.
This recession is hammering the media industry in general. Things will change. One change I look forward to is the crumbling of shipping media's pay wall and the flourishing of better online advertising, and online advertising tools.
Tomorrow's shipping executive: Right or left?
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