Technology is slowly but surely changing the ways we live our lives. I used to spend a good part of my time reading the local newspaper everyday, just to play catch-up with the news. Problem is, news on the local papers are not exactly catered to my taste buds. Generally, I will just zoom in on the Money section, Commenary and Analysis and Digital Life. That’s about all. (Occasionally there will be some kind of Edison scandal or Zhang Ziyi pictures kind of stuff that catch my interests too.. but those are the exceptions… rather than the norm….)
Well, with the advent of the RSS feeds, I hardly even go to Straitstime Online (even though I just paid for a 200 SGD subscription just 2 months ago… ) It used to be good… because online definitely works better for me compared to reading off a bulky 50 page stack of yellowing papers… but the problem became more of relevancy.
Well Google Reader together wih the Plethora of RSS feeds help to solve this problem. I am able to tap on the latest technology news that I like. One of my good friends send me an interesting TechCrunch article on some struggling i-Phone developer and I am instantaneously hooked. Now, I am a TechCrunch subscriber.
I think StraitsTimes way of monetising content will one day be irrelevant. You see… a large part of straitstimes news, especially the overseas segments are just bought… in-bulk from reuters, bloomberg, etc… These people just stream their content over the internet for free. The only thing that is really being reported, i.e. sending someone down to a scene to perform your classic interview is generally for very local content.
An avid finanical news reader will just stream in the content from Bloomberg, CNBC, New York Times, etc… and they will be almost all covered save the little tit-bits of local news…. which frankly… did not quite interests me save the gst credits policy… which was really something ingenious.
In that case, should Straitstimes just do it the normal way, i.e. through pure advertising and give their content for free. They can monetise their feeds through things like feedburner too.. to serve ads to customer. But as my friend pointed out to me over lunch, this surviving on advertising model alone no longer works. Online advertising has only worked for one company, i.e. Google.. and they key was in a great business model in the Pay-Per-Click system.
Hmmm… so what is going to happen to our StraitsTimes and SPH?