Newsday made the bold (and some, like me, might say, silly choice) to lock its online content up behind a $5 per week paywall. Cablevision, who purchased the newspaper for $650 million in 2008, offers its website to Optimum Cable subscribers and Newsday subscribers for free, but charges anyone else $5 per week, and three months in, the numbers are starting to leak out.

First, how many people have signed up for $175 per month Newsday website? 35. Yes, 35 people. So that extra $9,000 a year must really make up for the estimated 50 percent drop in web traffic. At least they don’t have to pay famous columnists who want people to actually be able to read and share their work.

Now I look at these numbers and see evidence that paywalls might not be a great idea to make money. Even assuming the vast majority of Long Island (which Newsday targets) have free access as Optimum Online users, erecting the paywall means more costs like paying for more customer service and accountants, while even print newspapers find going free both saves tons of money and increases circulation (because they don’t have to pay for as many customer service agents or accountants).

Less traffic, tiny amount of money after spending tons (even to buy the paper). Maybe they’ll eventually learn their lesson that paywalls don’t work and end it like the New York Times did. And then forget and bring it back years after.

On the proverbial eve of the New York Times’ return to paywalldom (has everyone forgotten the Times already dropped its pay wall once because it didn’t work), a research firm posted a study showing 44 percent of Google News visitors scan headlines and don’t click through.

They think this is high. I’m shocked it’s so low.

Analyst Ken Doctor says: “Though Google is driving some traffic to newspapers, it’s also taking a significant share away. A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers’ individual sites.”

What is Google taking away? If I read all the newspaper and magazine headlines at the newsstand, am I taking something away? No. It’s the newspaper’s job to convince me to “buy” or, in this case, click. Google is providing a huge amount of free advertising for these newspapers and converting 56 percent of that traffic. Any marketer will tell you a 56 percent conversion rate is astronomically high. It is up to those newspapers to turn that traffic into loyal readers.

For Rupert Murdoch and others looking to block Google because it’s taking so much for itself, they are just going to leave that 56 percent for the thousands of other news sources willing share in free advertising. And if they really learn from this study, they’ll figure out how to write better headlines and better stories to convert the other 44 percent.

Rupert Murdoch, after a short time of seemed like he understood the internet was a new and exciting tool, has since changed his medication and now sees it as the evil of all evils. He has been pushing, vocally, not through action, reinstating paywalls on his various media properties. The Wall Street Journal is one of the last major newspapers to have a paywall around most of its content.

Now Murdoch is claiming he will block Google from indexing the WSJ and his other media properties. Murdoch told Sky News Australia “If they’re just search people… They don’t suddenly become loyal readers.” He explained that traffic from search engines involve no loyalty – just view a few headlines and leave.

Removing a site from Google takes just a few lines of code in a robot.txt file, something Google and other search engines make no attempt to hide. So why is Murdoch waiting?

Maybe because even without loyalty, Murdoch knows traffic will drop significantly without search engines bringing tons of free traffic. Even if 99 percent of those people never return, there are 1 percent that stay and might return. It’s up to Murdoch and his websites to give these users a reason to stay and then find ways to monetize that traffic. Murdoch has previously said no news websites or blogs are making serious money, ignoring the massive enterprises behind Gawker, Huffington Post, PerezHilton, TechCrunch and hundreds of others who have embraced the internet to find more cost-effective ways to engage audiences and produce compelling content.

Techdirt points out that for all Murdoch’s grandstanding, his own websites have aggregators that link to other people’s content the same way he claims others are stealing his content. When others aggregate content it’s stealing. When Murdoch does it, its convenient? Maybe this will stop his crusade to overturn fair use in the courts since he’d be culpable too.

CDs are dying, but the music industry is growing. Newspapers are dying, but journalism is thriving. DVD sales are dropping, but movie attendance is rising. Yet for all this, article after article says the music, news, and movie industry is dead or dying.

These industries are only dying if you classify them in ultra-specific and limiting businesses. CDs drop, but the music industry is selling more concert tickets and merchandise. The U.K. music industry’s own study (pdf) shows the music business overall has increased even though sales of record music has plummeted.  Even as newspapers suffer, hundreds of new journalism organizations are popping up producing original news, commentary, and fact-checking, all for a fraction of the cost, manpower, and time it takes traditional newspapers. And does everyone forget television news continues to grow in audience and revenue (well, at least cable news). And movies, well, attendance is up even in a down economy.

Technology and societal changes often causes radical shifts in how businesses do business. The death of selling plastic discs and packets of paper is, yes, dying, and for the time, these were the most effective ways to make money. With better computers and distribution channels, it is incredibly cheaper to make and distribute movies, music, and news articles.  This means more money to do other things. Or better, cheaper costs to consumers leading to a larger market – and then more fans to sell more stuff to.

The movie and music industries particularly have enjoyed monopoly pricing on their products, and without competition, fans paid the high prices. But competition from technology, even when used illegally, is forcing prices down. Originally, plastic discs were a scarce good the content industry could control, but the digital files on the discs are infinite goods now available free online no matter what.

Let’s remember, selling plastic discs (or records) for music is really only about 60-70 years old. Movies only entered home collections in the 1980s (and followed a significant legal battle where the movie industry claimed home video would destroy them). These industries made tons of money before and they can make even more money now by evolving their business models – recognizing they are in the music or movie or news industry, not just in the sell-discs-and-paper industry.

I began working at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers a few months ago (hence my sparse blogging) and have watched basic economics at work. Two or more people bid against each other, offering more and more money until no one is willing to spend more. In traditional commerce, the goal is not to sell to the highest bidder, but set your price to attract the largest number of buyers. This is the difference between value and price. Value equals what each person is willing to pay while price is what the actual cost is.  A few months ago, I wrote about customers, or individuals, can be wrong in the marketplace, but as a whole, the market is always right.  The market is a greater indicator of what’s valuable and for how much. Auctions are a microcosm of these market effects. In auctions, we get to see how value, price, and markets can work for and sometimes against each other within very small sets.

Within our capitalist society, our goal is to make money.  For many, this means selling goods. So in any auction, the goal is to sell each good, or lot, for the largest amount of money.

Let me walk you through an auction example where I explain how value and price differ. I really want a painting.  Another person, Jack, also wants this same painting. I am willing to spend $15,000 maximum on this painting, meaning, I value this painting up to $15,000. Jack is only willing to spend $10,000, meaning he values the painting at up to $10,000. We both bid on the painting until Jack bids $10,000. I bid $11,000. Jack only values the painting up to $10,000, so anything higher would be a perceived loss for him. The price is too high compared to the perceived value he receives. I buy the painting for the price of $11,000, $4,000 less than my perceived value.  This is a net gain for me because the price was lower than my perceived value. The painter owner still gets $11,000, the auction house gets its commission, and I get a painting I really wanted. Everyone wins, even Jack who keeps his $10,000 to spend on something else. Because the painting sold for more than he valued it at, he did not loose anything, whereas had he spent more than his maximum, he might have felt like he lost something.

Now some may not agree this was a win-win-win-win. Because I was willing to pay $4,000 more, the owner and auction house lost out on more money. But according to auction (and marketplace) rules, I only have to pay more than the last bidder. So if I were asked to then pay more than the $11,000, I might feel cheated or like I lost something because the market, comprised of Jack and me, deemed the painting should be priced at $11,000.

This is where auctions show the ignorance of the individual and the wisdom of the market. People selling their goods through the auction house, called consigners, can place reserves on their goods. Reserves are the minimum price a consigner is willing to sell the good for. If the auction price is less than the reserve, the item goes unsold. Auction houses often provide low and high estimates appraising the value of the good and the reserve cannot be higher than the low estimate.

So let’s apply a reserve to my previous example. Let’s say the consigner has a $15,000 reserve on the painting.  This is the consigner placing a price on their good based on what they believe other people’s perceived value will be. This is why problems in commerce occur – when the seller and the buyer’s views of value fail to meet.

But I was willing to pay $15,000, you say. True, but that was based on the understanding that someone else was willing to pay $14,000. Because I now understand what the market values the painting at, $11,000, I may change my own perceived value of the good. Think of it as competition pushing the price (not value) down, because I know no one will pay more than $11,000.

So the auction house may try to arrange a private sale between myself and the consigner where I may raise the payment price and the consigner may lower their reserve – the price they are willing to sell for.  If the consigner sticks with $15,000 and I am unwilling to pay it, we both lose. I don’t get the painting, and they get no money. Maybe they’ll make more at a later date, but they might also make less. During that time, I might buy another painting and no longer want this one.

How can we apply this to the price of free and all the industries challenged by it? First, the price of free is not representative of value as so many content producers confuse. The painting, and many auction items, are sought after because of scarcity and unique qualities that give them high value. Since buyers cannot find this same value in other goods, they are willing to spend money to buy the goods. Newspapers, music, and entertainment programs are no similarly scarce and unique, rather, they are quite ubiquitous and easy to find. If I can watch one TV, I have 500 other channels to pick from, plus on demand, plus online sources, play other media like video games to spend my time.

Auctions, as I said, are a microcosm where only two people are needed to bid up the price of a good. This is attributed to the aforementioned scarcity of the goods – if you only have one or two to sell, you only need one or two buyers. For general consumer goods, auctions would not be effective since companies need to sell hundreds if not millions to meet their desired profit goals. So companies have to balance price with their assumption of the market’s average perceived value of their product in order to sell the largest of number of goods at the highest possible price.

As we are seeing, many industries are setting higher reserves on their goods than the market is willing to pay. Music companies want licensing fees so high that TV shows can’t be released; gene patent holders charge to much for researchers to license. Movie companies are trying to force more money from Redbox and newspapers think consumers will give up free blogs to pay for online news.  All these industries ignore what the market is saying, instead trying to say they are smarter or more attune to the value of their own products. But value is not about what it cost to make or how much time was spent making it. Value only matters for how much people are willing to pay. If consumers are not willing to pay anything, then no amount of government intervention or PR manipulation will change that. The market wants what the market wants and the market is still always right. Instead of fighting the market, recognize their wisdom and find a way to make money in the new market. It’s a lot easier, cheaper, and more profitable than trying to change how the market, and basic economics, works.

I keep looking for other things to write about, but the newspaper industry just keeps giving me great posts to write.  Let’s first look at this Washington Post article that pretty much argues for ending all the useful innovations of the internet to save newspapers.  It’s written by two former newspaper lawyers, but the Washington Post wouldn’t be swayed by that kind of conflict of interest.

Michael Masnick does an already perfect job of dismantling the outrageous arguments in the article. To summarize, the authors, Bruce W. Sanford and Bruce D. Brown, seem to be calling for an end to search engines and fair use while expanding copyright law to cover “hot news” and allowing newspapers to violate antitrust laws (while still offering them tax breaks).

But all this talk of saving newspapers still ignores why newspapers are more important than news. Newspapers are not the only source of journalism and any legislative attempts to save them only support an obsolete business model. Masnick cites from Dale Harrison’s comments on the Post article.

A lesson worth remembering is at the turn of the 20th century people had a transportation problem…and the solution turned out not to be a “faster horse”…but a Ford.

And one should note that the Ford didn’t arise out of the “Horse Industry Revitalization Act”.

I think the future of the media business will look as different as Ford and Toyota’s operations look from horse traders and blacksmiths.

Imagine what the passage of such ill-conceived legislation would have done to the car industry a century ago.

Harrison goes on to show that newspapers, for decades, had a monopoly on distribution. This lead to inflated advertising prices and likewise inflated budgets (much of the reason newspapers are in trouble now is the massive amount of debt they acquired during the bubble 90s). This monopoly distribution is dismantled with the internet, forcing advertising prices down to real market values and giving customers almost infinite choices for their content consumption.  Because of this basic economic fact, newspapers cannot sustain the business model they’ve been using for the past century.  It’s time to evolve.

But we’re scared if we lose newspapers, we lose journalism because none of these bloggers or aggregators create content.  If that so, then why is Maureen Dowd getting accused of plagiarizing a blogger? I’ve already criticized Dowd’s incredible misunderstanding of the internet and newspaper economics as well as her accusations of copyright infringement at Google (even though Google only links to content).  I actually have no problem with Dowd copying the blogger (she can copy me anytime) – plagiarism can actually be a good thing sometimes – but Dowd’s hypocrisy shows that 1) newspaper journalists are not perfect and 2) some bloggers can apparently write really well.

Also, let’s note that bloggers exposed Dowd’s plagiarism and pressured her to update her column online (and a correction in the Times).

Thankfully, not every newspaper wants to remain in the 1980s. John Naughton writes for the Guardian saying capitalism will eventually kill off newspapers that can’t evolve, leaving the market winners to better understand how to run a news business (not just paper) in the 21st century.

The problem at the moment is that the web is awash with free content, and in a competitive market the price always converges on the marginal cost – which is currently zero. But as providers disappear (or, like Murdoch, decide to charge), the supply of free news will diminish and something more like a normal market will emerge. Only then will we find out what people are willing to pay for news.

That takes care of the economics. But what will journalism be like in the perfectly competitive online world? One clue is provided by the novelist William Gibson’s celebrated maxim that “the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed”. In a recent lecture, the writer Steven Johnson took Gibson’s insight to heart and argued that if we want to know what the networked journalism of the future might be like, we should look now at how the reporting of technology has evolved over the past few decades.

The future is now. See if you can catch up.

After my IP class last week, a classmate and I continued our debate.  He said something that stuck with me: “Companies won’t leave money on the table.”  But in many cases, companies do leave money on the table. Sometimes the risk isn’t worth the reward, but sometimes it’s sheer stubbornness.

I mentioned Farhad Manjoo’s article about why there is no iTunes for a movies a few weeks ago.  The reason, according to Manjoo, is there are too many contracts to renegotiate and too many people to get permission from to make an all-you-can-download movie service cost effective.  This is not because it’s actually expensive to make (all those BitTorrent sites seem to manage). It’s because the variety of rights holders demand too much money.  Rights holders over value their copyright (or patent other cases).  They demand more money than someone can make selling another product (like a download service).  Instead of getting paid, nothing gets done or sold, meaning everyone leaves money on the table.

Want a nice, clean consumer example? iTunes introduced variable pricing for music at the demand of the record companies.  Record companies could choose a lower 69 cent price, the regular 99 cent price, and a $1.29. Few chose the lower price, pushing popular and new songs to the higher $1.29.  Early results show the labels are losing money from the decrease in sales – unit sales have dropped to the point where actual revenue is lower than when prices were 99 cents. Don’t say they weren’t warned.

The examples are numerous, from newspapers threatening Google even though its sends them tons of free traffic to monetize to Warner Music demanding more money from YouTube and music games like Guitar Hero, ignoring the huge promotional benefit they get from both.  TV shows like the Wonder Years can’t appear on DVD or TV because of the over-priced music. Other shows have changed the music, from Dawson’s Creek to WKRP in Cincinnati.

In the patent world, having too many patents in one area is called a patent thicket and can make it hard for research because it requires so many different licenses (and too many companies over valuing their intellectual property) that it becomes cost-prohibitive to research either from licensing or lawsuits.  Some companies collect their patents to allow products to be made, but these patent pools often do more harm than good. This is even hampering drug research:

Peter Ringrose, chief scientific officer at Bristol-Myers, has said there are more than 50 proteins possibly involved in cancer that the company was not working on because the patent holders either would not allow it or were demanding unreasonable royalties.

Yes, I went there. You might die because greedy companies refuse to take money.

In all seriousness, intellectual property not only gives monopoly rights to a single entity, but it also comes a sense of entitlement that seems to hurt the rights holder and everyone down the supply chain, including consumers.  This is because rights holders significant over-value their own intellectual property.  Much of the value from content comes from how it reaches the consumer, whether on DVD, TV, or some innovative package.  Pricing yourself out of these products does not make your content more valuable – it devalues it because consumers don’t experience it.  Companies are leaving money on the table, not just from the initial royalties, but from the future revenue made by future sales of products based on new fans or new innovations.

Shockingly, I read newspaper…content. Like most Wednesdays and Sundays, I enjoy Maureen Dowd’s dry wit and political commentary. She’s brilliant and kept me sane during much of the election (except for when she wrote her column in French and Latin). But today, Dowd’s column took aim against a true evil, Google, for destroying newspapers.

Dowd, in skillful style, made no question about Google’s culpability. She just compared Google to Big Brother and said while Google’s C.E.O. Eric Schmidt isn’t Dick Cheney, he isn’t far off.  He hates your privacy, but he hates newspapers more.

Dowd is a columnist, and I love her for her opinions.  But this column ignored the basic economics and facts of newspapers’ relationship with Google.  She makes it sound like Google it’s just taking content, posting it, and then laughing as newspapers suffer. She writes “Google is in a battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from newspaper content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy…[Schmidt] declines to pony up money, noting that newspapers could opt out of giving their content to Google free and adding, ‘We actually like making our own money for obviously good capitalist reasons.’”

But Google does not take newspaper content or post it (with the exception of Associated Press content which it explicitly pays for), Google just links to the content.  Google, in fact, only added ads to its News search the beginning of this year. Before that, Google made no money directly from news search. But either way, Google just links to news articles.  It helps people find the news articles they want.  Google sends thousands if not millions of people to newspapers through these links.

But Dowd, instead of realizing how much Google increases the value of her content, tries to paint them as just a step behind Dick Cheney in taking over the world.

Newspapers as a whole need to stop looking for people to blame (Techdirt has the excellent point that Craigslist deserves just as much if not more blame for “stealing” all those classified ads it doesn’t charge for).  Dowd is just another newspaper veteran looking to protect newspapers without asking if there’s a better way.  Just because you’ve always done it one way, doesn’t mean business can’t evolve.  Look at how newspapers used to do business – they lost money. Weird.

This, I did not expect. I’ve been following the crisis of the newspaper industry closely and have many suggestions, which I’ve discussed here.  A new suggestion has come to my attention from a 1918 Atlantic Monthly article claiming the death of newspapers. As history shows, this was a little premature.

Oswald Villard found daily newspapers had rising costs and rarely, if ever, any profit.  He writes:

It is a fact, too, that there are few other fields of enterprise in which so many unprofitable enterprises are maintained. There is one penny daily in New York which has not paid a cent to its owners in twenty years; during that time its income has met its expenses only once. Another of our New York dailies loses between four and five hundred thousand dollars a year, if well-founded report is correct, but the deficit is cheerfully met each year. It may be safely stated that scarcely half of our New York morning and evening newspapers return an adequate profit.

That $500,000 loss compared to $7 million in today’s dollars (according to Slate), which pales in comparison to the $85 million the Boston Globe expects to lose this year alone. But Villard highlights the unique business model many newspapers used to support.  He claims owners were willing to accept losses in their newspapers because of the prestige of owning one.  Slate puts it: “A newspaper owner gets a place at every table, access to all the top politicians’ ears, and the power to impose his worldview on his readers—or, at least, the illusion of such influence.”

Few businessmen are willing to make such expensive vanity purchases (Slate makes some notable exceptions, like Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post or Mortimer Zuckerman’s New York Daily News).  Of course, stock markets, quarterly reporters, and multi-billion dollar sales turned the newspaper business into a profit boon for the 80s and 90s with few expecting the bubble to burst.

For naysayers predicting the demise of democracy should newspapers all disappear (unlikely), the vanity business model represents only one of many, many options to develop news and other businesses. I doubt this trend will take the business world by storm, but the history lesson is worth noting – business isn’t always about money. There’s power and influence too. I’ve been a proponent of the value of self-promotion (like this blog), but maybe even multi-billion dollar corporations have a place in a vanity portfolio.

I often get into arguments about why I don’t think piracy is wrong, but actually helpful to businesses.  The crux of many arguments, from newspapers to music to software, revolves around how people should be paid for their work rather than will people pay for that work.  This is a serious disconnect that explains much of the frustration many feel regarding new business models and free content.

Content creators argue they should be paid for their work. If they aren’t paid for their work, no one will make music, movies, investigative journalism, or video games. We’ll live in a silent, non-fun, corrupt world of animals on skateboards.

But this is not the economic reality.  In capitalism, people can try to make money, but there is no right to it.  600,000 small businesses are started each year and more than 50 percent will fail within the first five years.  No one should have to support these businesses. It’s up to each business to find a market need and fill that need.  While making money is obviously the goal, it is a side effect of effectively meeting a market need.

The content industry (I’m including newspapers and software) certainly filled important market needs – entertainment, productivity products, information and education, etc.  But they got used to a business model based on little competition and monopolies on distribution. The market has changed, but the market need is still there.  People will always want all these products.  But without the monopoly on distribution, consumers have more choice to market products.  More competition drives prices down, and this means for the content industry, the price of content is zero.  The value is still high, but there’s so much of it, you can’t price it higher.  It doesn’t matter if you should be paid for your content.  No one will pay you because another company will fill the market need at the lower price.  This is why you have to treat piracy like a competitor, not a threat, because it’s the market demanding change.

When a company says people should pay, it’s claiming a right and entitlement to compensation.  Obviously, if someone works hard, it’s good to be rewarded, but often hard work comes with the risk you won’t be properly compensated. That is business. It’s competition. It’s healthy for the economy overall.  If companies are guaranteed money, they don’t have to try as hard to earn consumer’s money by creating valuable products that feed market needs.

This is why Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt was so right when he told newspaper executives they shouldn’t piss off consumers.  Consumers decide how they want to consume news, not news executives.  If consumers won’t pay for newspapers, then newspapers will go out of business.  Nothing can change that.  You might think they should or even have to pay, but the economic reality is, they won’t.  Even if piracy is stealing, it’s the economic reality. It’s what the market wants. Nothing can change that.  The successful businesses of the future will learn how to capitalize on this market demand and find new, innovative ways to make money.  Everyone else will get left behind.