If you're going to charge me for it, I better get to use it!
Posted by Atex Blog on Mon, Mar 01, 2010
How far the Internet has come? Fifteen years ago – back in the days of those screeching dial-up modems – the Internet opened up for me a window into a whole new world of communication (which in the mind of a teenage boy refers normally to communication with members of the fairer sex). It was (relatively) expensive, slow, inefficient but man, was it addictive! Today however, apart from using the Internet to chat girls up (which to be honest, is happening less and less now that I am happily married), I find I am using it for everything from paying bills and submitting tax returns to being able to stream football matches involving my beloved Blackburn Rovers and making VoIP calls to my parents in New Zealand.
Indeed, apart from the fact that the Internet has made things extremely convenient, the fact that I don't have to pay for most of these services makes it a no brainer. Why should I spend two Ringgit on a newspaper when the news in it is already outdated (and indeed the same content – updated and corrected in most instances – is available for free on the newspaper's website)? What advantage does placing a classified ad in my local paper to sell my Proton Wira hold when any semi- Web-savvy buyer would know that shopping is so much more convenient when done online where everything is indexable, searchable and - best of all - free to use.
This does present a problem to traditional newspaper publishing as a whole of course; good journalism does not come free and with more and more people turning to online alternatives to get news and other editorial content, publishers are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet as print advertising revenue continues to fall. Indeed, with online services like Craigslist and Monster effectively giving advertising space away for free, newspapers clearly have to rethink their revenue strategy or risk irrelevance.
News Corporation – one of the largest users of Atex software in Asia Pacific and among the largest media corporations in the world – is taking the bold step of charging consumers for their online editorial content. It is bold because it could be extremely easy for them to lose a significant chunk of their readership to competing news organizations who continue to publish all their content online for free and indeed end up in a worse situation than they currently are in (which to be fair, is really not as bad as how some other news publishers have fared in the last year or so). However, if they do play their cards right, it is probably just as likely for them – as an early adopter of this approach – to lead the print media industry into the digital future where consumers willingly pay for content that is customized to their needs and lifestyle.
Whether or not Murdoch's approach to bringing news publishing into the future works out, one thing is for sure: operating a paid service is nothing like giving stuff away for free. Having paying customers mean that every system downtime is potentially revenue threatening. An online service that is unreliable but is free I can tolerate; after all I'm not paying anything to use it and well, it's easy enough to move to a competitor. But if I have paid for a service, I'm committed to it and if I can't use it when I need to; that's akin to making me pay for a product that I can't use.
Fortunately, Atex's Digital solution has an autonomous mode which continues to serve up content even when the backend is not responding; whether for routine maintenance work or something more serious like a database crash. Because reliability is key, especially when your customers are paying cold hard cash to get to your content. Read all about it and lots more here.
Submitted by Joseph Poh, Atex Development Team Lead