Set it free and if readers come back to you, make ‘em pay

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Did South Africa's big news portals miss the memo?

I discovered recently that the man who uttered that famous phrase, "Information wants to be free", said immediately afterwards that information also wants to be expensive.

Hmm. Now if this isn't a case of quoting out of context then I'll eat my frilly knickers. "Information wants to be free" has become an axiom for our times, justifying everything from pirating one's offspring's favourite movies to traditional media companies' nervousness about charging for their online content.

I happened upon the omission in a recent edition of Fortune magazine, which did a catch-up interview with the man in question, Silicon Valley futurist Stewart Brand.

It turns out that what Brand actually said at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984 (in response to a question by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak ) was: "On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

It got me thinking about what I'm prepared to pay for as traditional media houses across the world wrestle with monetising their online content.

I already pay for satellite TV even though it's fashionable to declare that there's so little to watch on "all those" channels. Why? Because the content is better than South Africa's terrestrial stations, there are fewer commercial breaks and I can't imagine getting through a rainy day with a four year old sans our good friends, Charlie and Lola.

I'd certainly pay for a radio station with a mix of excellent news, current affairs analysis and decent music. Why radio stations in this country have to be either all talk or inane play lists, I'll never know. Do the broadcasters know, I wonder?

I've always paid for my local newspaper to be delivered to my home and I'd pay extra for online access but only if offered a lot more than I already read while I drink my morning coffee: hyper local news that's useful such as a complete listing of what's on around town from shop sales to shows, crime and traffic reports and for the opportunity to interact with other readers on the stories in the paper. As long as it's in print (and until it can be downloaded on to a digital reader), I prefer to get my daily news over breakfast and not when I sit down at my laptop.

I would pay for a big SA news portal such as IOL, News24, Mail & Guardian or The Times - but only one - and only if they were all charging for access.

I would cough up for a big international publication such as The New York Times or The Guardian if I could download it on to a digital reader (Kindle, here we come!) and tuck into its meaty features on the couch.

I want information for free, for sure, but I'll pay up if it's good enough and only if I can't hunt it down for free elsewhere.

This, of course, is a pickle for traditional media companies across the world as they continue to search for a way to sustainably monetise their online content. Running these online divisions, of course, can be an expensive business.

To attract advertising you need to either deliver loads of traffic or a focused audience. If you're a big news portal, the first is not easy in South Africa as the internet audience is quite small (4.5m) and there's so much competition. The second is tricky because they are general news sites without even a geographical focus.

If you can't get the advertising you want, the other option is to charge for your content - but then you have to deliver a compelling offering, more than you serve up in your print publications and better than your competitors.

To increase audience, some of the big news portals are exploring mobile strategies but to my mind this is a dead end unless you get your content right and make it valuable. The current thinking internationally is that hyper local is the way to go. I guess the gurus forgot to pass the memo along to the traditional media houses in South Africa.

Of course, this is a transition period and when digital readers reach South Africa -- and they will eventually - it'll be a complete game changer. Now if I was traditional media house, I'd be getting in on owning the technology. Can you imagine being the guy who charges everyone else to use your medium?

My guess is that if anyone in traditional media has the vision to do so, it will be Naspers, owners of Media24, which already does very nicely out of its pay-TV operation and has its finger in all sorts of other nifty little pies such as MXit.

But then Naspers can't even be called a traditional media company anymore. They may own papers such as Beeld, Rapport and the Daily Sun but they're literally streets ahead of the likes of Avusa, Caxton and the Independent when it comes to new media - and they're doing it in lucrative emerging markets across the world, such as China and Russia.

I think their canny CEO, Koos Bekker, got the right information in the right place many years ago.

*Gill Moodie spent 14 years as a salaried hack in print media in South Africa and the UK before escaping to the blogosphere and freelance journalism. She is the publisher of Grubstreet http://grubstreet.co.za/ in between unpacking and packing the infernal dishwasher and bringing up a four-year-old with attitude.