Mark Potts, who writes the excellent Recovering Journalist blog, has a story “It’s Not the News. It’s the Packaging” that really rang my bell, he’s trying to cut through so much of the simplistic discussion about newspapers charging for content online, by making the point that:

Maybe—maybe—the thing you can charge for is the package the news comes in, not the specific news items themselves.

I dropped a comment onto his blog saying:

This whole issue of context and packaging is a theme I’ve started to push with a number of people. We used to run a large subscription only niche content site network. A large portion of our content was not unique, it was readily available through other sources. People paid our subscription fees for:

Context – we placed individual items into an overall picture.

Convenience – we delivered in the format they wanted, when they wanted

Personalisation – we let them filter to suit their needs.

It led to very loyal subscribers (now heading towards 9+ years) and consequently a successful business.

Mark struck a chord with me because these are themes that we’ve looked at in detail in our Niche Content Millionaire book (yeah yeah, it’s coming, surprising how long editing takes).

Offline content publishers around the world have embraced the idea that their print publication content has value online, and someone will buy it. It’s a naive notion, and a trap that many traditional offline publishers fell into in the early years of the new century. They were eyeing off what seemed like the successes of some of their brethren, gorillas like the Financial Times of London and the Wall Street Journal, both of whom introduced subscription versions of their paper publications. Yet in context of their overall readership and revenues, these behemoths of the media made very little money online. Only a tiny fraction of their readership were sufficiently attracted to the online editions to pay the annual subscription fees.

These publishers thought they could simply shove their existing print content onto the Internet and sell access to those millions of words just as if it was a news stand on a corner of Times Square. They were wrong, and many have now dropped the online subscription model.

None of these publishers stopped to think about how human beings work. A printed newspaper is a particular form of content. It’s organized into sections, it has shape and form and editorial direction. It’s designed to be consumed in a certain way, and to fulfill a particular purpose. Human beings intrinsically want their world to be organized. If we had an infinite amount of time in our days, then fine, we could sort through, analyze and filter the information around us, shape it for a particular purpose. Instead we have 24 hours in a day, and, it seems, ever increasingly complex lives.

Here are the truths we have established after ten years in the online content business:

• There’s too much information in the world
• No one source of information can provide all the information

Seems obvious when you think about it. Here’s the next set of truths that follow on:

• People do not have much time to source information
• People are individuals

Faced with these truths, our conclusion has remained constant for many years:

People want the information they need, when they want.

And you can charge them money for that.