Newspapers, Syndicate To Sell E-newsletters

By: Steve Outing As I said in an earlier column, the Internet is a difficult
medium on which to sell content, because there is so much
competition. If thousands and thousands of Web sites begin
charging, it will be the rare one that makes more than a small
amount of money. What's needed is a way to package and bundle
content to create a value proposition such that online users will
open their wallets.

The online arm of Universal Press Syndicate is about to try an
experiment that will create e-newsletters in partnership with
newspaper Web sites -- and allow the news sites to charge for the
privilege.

Uclick is a few weeks away
from demonstrating the concept, which combines its stable of
syndicated content with original information from local news
partners.

Consumer choice

Here's how this model might look to the online consumer: The user
of a newspaper site signs up to receive a regular e-newsletter --
and pays for the service. During the sign-up process, he is
presented with a laundry list of content to be included in his
daily delivery, and selects the content he wants and the delivery
schedule.

As an example, a subscriber might opt to receive daily: top local
news headlines; daily horoscope for Capricorn; articles about the
New York Yankees; weather forecast for his city; "Dear Abby";
daily editorial cartoons from Pat Oliphant and Tony
Auth; favorite comic strips like "Doonesbury," "Foxtrot," and
"Cats With Hands"; the "Universal Music Crossword"; and the "News
of the Weird" column.

The details haven't been worked out yet, but the likely message
received by the consumer would aggregate all of his choices, with
URLs (links) to the actual content.

You might recognize this as the daily digital delivery of a local
newspaper -- but personalized, without any of the stuff that you
don't normally read. (The concept also is similar to a several-
year-old service called Infobeat, which allows its
users to subscribe to various types of content -- including from
syndicates like Universal Press -- and have it delivered by e-
mail, for free.)

The problem is ...

Uclick views its upcoming e-mail delivery service as a way to
help its client publishers, and its content creators. "Uclick has
a great business," says COO Chris Pizey, "but the problem
is that all our clients have a negative cash flow. That's scary
for a business like ours" which deals exclusively in selling
online content.

So the company wants to help its clients, and itself. The
solution is to act as an ASP (application service provider) for
Web sites, providing the technology infrastructure and operations
mechanism to deliver bundled content in a user-customizable e-
newsletter on publishers' behalf -- and selling packages of its
content to publishers to include in the e-mail service.

"We're saying, 'We've got some great content; let's look at how
can we can package it to sell it,'" says Pizey.

Uclick isn't new to delivering e-mail. Its uComics.com service currently
delivers 700,000 comic strips directly to consumers daily (for
free), and Pizey believes that uclick has the technology
expertise to provide the service without going to third-party e-
mail delivery partners.

What uclick doesn't have is a scalable online transactions
system, so the company has enlisted the aid of Clickshare, a pay-per-click
and online transactions service provider that has specialized in
working with the news industry. Clickshare's system for
collecting money online and tracking transactions will work
across all sites that participate in the uclick-powered
customizable e-mail newsletter program.

When an online user signs up for an e-newsletter at a newspaper
site, he'll get a Clickshare account at the same time -- and that
same log-in/password will work at other sites that participate in
the uclick and Clickshare programs. Clickshare president Nell
Fields emphasizes that her company's brand name is in the
background, and that the news or Web site offering the e-
newsletter service has the primary relationship with the
customer. (Likewise, to the consumer uclick is in the background,
too.)

Clickshare is an interesting choice. That company has been around
since the mid 1990s, and until recently it hasn't made much noise
in the marketplace. Competitor Qpass has had the highest profile
in the online content sales space when it comes to working with
media companies. But Clickshare has beefed up its management
ranks and currently is working more aggressively to court
interest from major media companies.

(Part of the reason Clickshare languished until recently was the
pervasive nature of the free-content model on the Internet. Only
after the Internet sector imploded and free content proved to be
an unsustainable model has interest begun to shift to selling
content instead of giving it away. The company is beginning to
benefit from this shift of emphasis away from free content.)

Clickshare also is working with uclick on a commerce component
for some of the syndicate's comics and the "Dear Abby" column.
Using Clickshare as the transactions component, uclick will be
selling "Dear Abby" informational pamphlets and back copies of
comic strips -- via its own site and uclick client Web sites.

Will this work?

Will consumers pay for a bundled-content e-mail service like
this? We obviously don't have an answer for that question yet,
but as Pizey points out, "The bottom line is, (on the Web)
content is being given away -- and that doesn't work." As an
industry, online media must begin charging for some content.
"Either consumers start to pay, or (some content) goes away
(online)," he says.

(It should be noted that uclick is not demanding that its client
publishers charge for the syndicated e-mail service. Pizey says
that they can choose to offer it for free. However, if some news
sites charge for a service that others offer free, that's not
exactly helping the cause of encouraging people to pay for
content.)

I think that the key for a service like uclick's is that there's
enough content, and that it's important enough and unique enough
that people will be willing to pay for it. What's not enough to
charge for is a daily e-mail service that offers content from a
single publication or Web site.

Some newspaper sites already are offering e-newsletters for free.
The Denver Post Online, for example, offers a variety of
free newsletters using e-mail delivery vendor PublishMail.
PublishMail also handles e-newsletters for the Boston Herald,
InsideBayArea.com, InYork.com, and TownOnline.com.

Could the Post and other newspaper sites charge for this
type of service? PublishMail president James Tailer says
the challenge is in figuring out what content to offer that
people will pay for. What too many newspaper sites want to do is
take content that's been produced for other purposes and offer
that as e-newsletter content. To warrant a price tag, a publisher
is best off producing original, unique content that can't be
duplicated elsewhere, he says. Only that will induce online users
in sufficient numbers to actually pay money for e-newsletter
content.

To move to e-mail newsletters that support paid subscriptions, we
will need original content (not found elsewhere) and bundling of
content from multiple sources. Will the content of a local
newspaper site plus a package of uclick syndicated content be
enough? I suspect not, but this is where a network model can take
us up a step and perhaps get to the point of offering an
acceptable value proposition to the consumer.

Clickshare's Fields says that the uclick e-mail service envisions
a system where content could be combined from various
publications and media sources. So, a consumer signing up at
Newspaper Web Site A might select not only content from Site A
plus uclick syndicated features, but also content from a variety
of other news and content sites. (Imagine signing up at
latimes.com, but being able to order features from
washingtonpost.com and InsideBayArea.com additionally, for
instance.)

As Fields explains the concept, Clickshare can serve to purchase
content from network member sites and sell it wholesale to the
publisher with whom the customer has the primary relationship.
The publisher then sells an e-newsletter service that bundles
content from itself, uclick's syndicated content, and selected
content from other sites on the network. Money is collected from
the consumer by Clickshare, which divvies it up to the
appropriate parties who earn a piece of the sale.

With this model, I think we're getting somewhere. A service that
offers the convenience of gathering and distributing to the
consumer premium content from a variety of media sources --
that's something that online users just might pay for. At least,
let's hope so.


Other recent columns

In case you missed recent Stop The Presses!, here are
links to the last few columns:
o A Solution To the Pay-vs.-Free Dilemma, Wednesday, May 23
o Two Money-making Techniques You Haven't Tried Yet, Wednesday, May 9
o What TiVo Teaches Us About the Internet, Wednesday, April 18
o Archive of columns


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This column is written by Steve
Outing for Editor & Publisher Online. Tips, letters and feedback
can be sent to Steve at steve@planetarynews.com


Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.