The Disruption of Days and the New News Unit of Sale

By: Elizabeth Coffey, Marketing G2 Digital Marketing Specialist

The transition from print to digital has been a rocky one at best for many news publishers out there. It’s difficult to reconcile the fact that what has been done for in some cases over a hundred years is no longer effective.

Selling newspapers by units of time (i.e. dailies, weeklies) made sense in the past because ads, articles, etc. had to be bundled together because of the physical medium, paper.

There was no efficient way to go about unbundling articles in paper format because the costs would be astronomical and there was no customer-driven desire to do so because it was just accepted that you had to take the stuff you were interested in with the stuff that you may not be interested in, but that someone in your household might be interested in what was known as 'pass along' readership.

The Digital Disruption

With the rise of the internet, everything changed. People could access information anytime and later, anyplace they wanted, in real time. Consumers became used to getting what they wanted when they wanted it, without all the other stuff they didn’t and 'pass along' readership died. Each reader could pick and choose what they wanted to read in real time on their own.

The internet has disrupted the idea of time as a unit of sale because readers have access to the internet 24 hours-a-day, 7 days-a-week; making time irrelevant. Time has been replaced by the article as the news industry unit of consumption. Even the nightly TV network news is a shadow of its former self. Yet this new reader consumption concept has been hard to reconcile with news publishers’ existing sales model.

Enter Flittz, a light-weight and easy-to-install, cost-effective program that allows your readers to buy your news by the article instead of daily, weekly, or monthly which leads them to buy more news at a higher price point because they don’t feel like they're buying more news than they can possibly consume, something that they are confronted with in a traditional subscription. This is a driver of churn and an unsatisfactory user experience because the reader never feels that they can get the full value of the subscription they paid for because there is too much to read.

Tune in next week to learn more about other industries that have had to unbundle and what that means for you and your news publication.

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