Can the Cable TV model save online journalism?

Collaboration between rival newspaper groups may sound more like a feel-good film storyline than reality, but that is what is happening in an exciting revenue sharing venture launched this week in Slovakia.

Project Piano was launched on Monday and creates a single pay wall for premium content of some of the country's biggest media houses.

For €2.90 a month (starting in early May — until then it is free) signing up to Piano will give a person access to premium content of nine of the biggest Internet sites.

The project has got SME, the country's second largest broadsheet on board, and access to the online version of the paper's Opinions section, and reader comments will only be available through the service.

Newspaper Pravda is following a similar model, where participation in forums and access to the Opinions section are under the pay wall.

With other participants it varies – national TV station TV JOJ provides ad-free access to its online version and video archive.

“We're encouraging the participants to try out different models to see what works and what doesn't,” the Piano Project's founder Tomas Bella told Business Line in an interview. Part of the revenue generated will be automatically paid to all the participating sites, while another part will be allocated on the basis of how long a user spends on the site.

The project will provide “very precise data on what people are willing to pay for and what they're not,” says Bella.

Bella became aware of the serious challenges of getting readers to pay for online content in his former role as the Editor-in-Chief of the news Web site Sme.sk .

The company's attempt to erect a pay wall a few years previously had been “a big failure,” he told Business Line . “Barely anyone signed up,” he said. He became increasingly convinced that it was not readers' willingness to pay that held them up, but the prospect of having to set up numerous separate accounts for different Web sites.

Bella, who soon left the newspaper group to set up media consultancy NextBig, found a partner organisation, Etarget that had come to the same conclusions he had.

The next step was getting the news organisations on board.

Bella admits this was challenging, though the country's small size and his own media connections were a huge advantage.

“Many were thinking about charging customers anyway – what we convinced them of was the fact that what they had was not so utterly unique as they thought and that they would benefit from working together,” he said.

The firm undertook research which found that nearly three or four times the people were willing to pay for packages as were for individual access.

While having so many of a country's media under one pay wall has raised some alarm bells, Bella is keen to stress it's nothing new. “We are trying to copy the Cable TV model,” he says, pointing to the success of packaging different content together for TV. “Why should it be any different online?”

Adopting the cable TV model also means giving the participating media houses more than what they'd be able to achieve alone.

“We're looking at working with the telecom providers so when people sign up for a broadband service they're given the option of signing up for the service,” he says.

A similar model has already been launched last year in the US Press+, while another European initiative, Flattr doesn't create a pay wall but does provide a single platform where users can pay for blogs they like.

So, are collaborative payment models the future?

Bell believes his model works best in small to medium markets, and has already attracted interest from publishing houses abroad.

The firm has received angel investment for international expansion, and is currently looking at options in Scandinavia, the Benelux countries and Portugal.

“We think there are 10 to 15 countries in Europe where our model would work well.”

Whether Project Piano succeeds in convincing other publishing houses remains to be seen, but its model must be taken seriously, with the success or failure of individual pay walls far from clear.

After the New York Times launched its much anticipated pay wall on March 28, research firm Experian Hitwise found that visits fell by as much as 15 per cent a day in the 12 days that followed, with page views falling up to 30 per cent.

In other cases the situation has been far less severe than the critics feared: News Corp's British papers The Times and The Sunday Times , have built up 79,000 online subscribers, according to data released last month, a respectable increase on the 50,000 it had a few months before.

Depending on the success of Project Piano and Press+, a new business model could soon be available to the media.

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