We can happily bang on about search marketing until the cows come home, but Clickmate is unequivocal about the one thing that underpins any good digital strategy, and that’s content.
This fact is becoming painfully obvious in the war that newspapers are currently waging to stay afloat. In the good old days, newspapers were physical platforms for display and classified advertisements. Journalists were there to provide the meat to the newspaper, the stories; the reason why people bought them in the first place. But journalists, sub editors and editors are not cheap, so the cover price alone could never support the running costs. Display and classified ads brought in the revenues and allowed newspapers to make big profits.
When print advertising began to tail off (hit by two whammies of a recession and the wide availability of different, especially digital publishing platforms), newspapers quickly faced a problem. They might have busy sites (as punters moved from physical editions to digital platforms), but the revenues generated by online display ads just did not cover the costs of the operation.
Thus, the solution was obvious – charge for content. The logic was simple. If you charge £1 for a physical copy of The Times, why not charge £1 a day for someone to access the website with the same editorial and some more goodies?
Wrong. When News International whacked up a pay wall for all its expensive content, it’s reckoned that 90% of the previous users would not pay.
Like it, or lump it, if you want to read The Times, or The Sunday Times online, you have to pay, and why not? Why can you expect someone who paid a £1 for a newspaper one day, expect then to read it for free the next. It was saying that those two titles should go down the free newspaper route and offer all their editorial for nothing.
That works for some and as the economy recovers it might be a perfectly valid model. But no-one can really expect that quality journalism can be supported on a free model, unless the advertising is frequent and in many ways intrusive.
The digital age has led people to expect a lot for nothing. We would argue that quality content has to be supported by decent revenues, because the alternative is poor journalism and greater reliance on advertising. Which is no way for a developed nation like the UK to be heading.
There has to be space for both the paid-for and free content models. But, somewhere along the line, content has to be funded – it is not cheap, nor should it be seen as an add-on.
As the old adage goes, content is king.