Opportunopoly

Online media opportunities abound if publishers are but willing to look beyond their traditional definitions. Opportunopoly examines emerging technology and market game-changers, thought leaders and, well, opportunities that may lie beyond the usual newspaper comfort zone.

As Chris Anderson's book Free hits the blogwaves, some "free" observations.

WSJ.com reports (many days after the hip-hop blogs) that, in the wake of his death, Michael Jackson's albums are topping the charts again and stores are scrambling to fill demand. 

Quincy Jones is buying back Vibe magazine, the hip-hop pub he founded to save it from the deadpool, but told EbonyJet.com that he’d already begun the process of trying to buy it back. The caveat is that print is no longer an option: “Print and all that stuff is over, we gotta remember that,” Jones said. “The Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Post Intelligencer. The Miami Herald. They’re over the same way as the record business. We have got to get into this century.” Vibe CEO Steve Aaron said that the website was profitable.

Washington Business Journal's "Business Pulse" poll (a non-scientific sampling) shows that 60 percent of WBJ's readers would miss the "local daily paper" if it ceased to exist. (38 percent wouldn't, 2 percent aren't sure.) Ironically, WBJ is running a television ad of a reader flipping through the sections of the Washington Post print edition trying to find the Business section. "Don't bother trying to find it -- it isn't there," says the announcer. That's why you need to subscribe to the Washington Business Journal. WBJ -- in fact, all the American City Business Journals -- are owned by privately held Advance Publications, which believes in paid, even though Conde Nast was among the first to take on Chris Anderson's theories in Free, most succinctly in Malcolm Gladwell's review in The New Yorker. 

That review was followed by several others: Seth Godin: "Malcolm is wrong." PaidContent.com: Chris Anderson vs Malcolm Gladwell: The Freestyle Fight, and "Newspapers need to find the 'Pet' for their Penguin." 

The conversation about the psychology of payment in all this is fascinating. What will people pay for? Something they have the perception that a) no one else has (get it before it's gone), that b) their competitors are getting, but they aren't, or c) that is personal and tailored entirely to them. A transformative, in-person "experience."  

Remember our good buddy from Zappos? He's charging more than $4K for a 2-day bootcamp at Zappos HQ (sans air fare, but including nearby hotel) that promises to transform your business by immersing you in the culture that went from $0 to a billion dollar business in 10 years. The reason why I was invited? I took them up on the free offer of the Zappo's Culture Book at the Vegas show. You'd probably have done it too, if you knew you were getting "free" something that you would have paid $17 for on their site. Even more significantly? Zappos has a "membership" site now for which it charges $39.95 to offer advice to those who know they need it. It's all about cultural transformation. 

But even the Washington Post knows that people will pay to rub shoulders with the people everyone things has the answers. They're planning on launching an executive news events series in the fall.

Personally, I'm immersing myself in the paid membership world, and will be sharing more insights on that business model soon. Let me just say that the online expert space is exploding, and the need for a personal guru is deeply rooted in American culture.

There are, of course, other efforts afoot in the newspaper business to give the appearance of exclusive, high-priced information. The Boston Globe is charging more than $50/month for home delivery, for example. But you can get two weeks free with the Kindle edition. We can only assume that Boston.com has joined the Amazon affiliates program. That way at least, if users buy the Kindle from the Globe site, the paper can keep the $50 commission for the sale.

Bottom line: Godin is a genius, but Malcolm may have something. Learn more about personalization and the The Tao of Pricing (hmm... there's that $39.95 again...). Be stingy with access to your true experts. Drive in-person, executive level education. Profit from new delivery media.

Death is not an option.  

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