Crikey, I’m coming back
Will people pay to read Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers online? Not if they remain unresponsive to reader needs and keep pushing out pap. It doesn’t mean newspapers are dead, for readers have been paying for good-quality news and commentary online for a long time.
I remember buying my first annual subscription to David Frith’s CDN news email service back when there was no such thing as a web page and it was delivered by fax. There’s still no website for CDN that I’m aware of — each morning it goes out as a PDF attachment to an email. Despite having no home on the web, CDN’s closely-targeted, exclusive stories mean it’s a small but long-lived business that pays mortgages (though not mortgages the size of Rupert’s).
I remember speaking to Stephen Mayne’s wife (though I forget her name) a decade ago about putting an advertisement in Crikey, which was then only available as an email newsletter because CMSs were huge, bespoke, expensive things small businesses couldn’t afford. I wanted CPMs and CPCs and monthly unique visitor numbers and the best poor Crikey could do back then was tell me how many email subscribers they had — there wasn’t even such a thing as an open rate metric back then.
The ad got a great response because Crikey had a small but homogenous audience, they were exactly who I needed to reach, and they were engaged enough to pay for a subscription.
Over the years my subscription to both CDN and Crikey have lapsed, but today I started a new subscription to Crikey. I want to remain a writer, and if writers of the future will be writing for a paid subscription audience, I better learn more about the kind of writing my audience is willing to pay for.
Crikey, I’m back.
After a long absence, I am once again paying for my daily online news. Dwell on that, Rupert...
