Tuesday, October 31, 2017

"Invisibly"? -- Or Visibly? ..."Finding the New Revenue Stream Publishers Dream Of"

"Can startup Invisibly be the new revenue stream publishers dream of?" asks Ken Doctor in his very interesting Newsonomics piece last week.
Led by the cofounder of Square, Invisibly promises “four-figure CPMs” and a way to make big money off readers who won’t subscribe. It says it has most of the U.S. digital news industry on board. But is it just “an ad network dressed up as a savior for news sites”?
(This post is based on the comment I made on Ken's piece.)

Invisibly?

There is much positive here -- but there is one fundamental concern at the heart of this -- the "invisibly" part!

The name relates to the handling of what is described on Invisibly's FAQ:
A digital wallet will accompany visitors as they navigate content across the internet. As the visitor happens upon participating sites, the digital wallet will invisibly keep a ledger of earnings from brand engagements and expenditures from content. At the optimal time, the system will prompt visitors to sign up and improve their experience, by giving them a choice of watching or avoiding ads. If a visitor wants to avoid ads, they can add payment (i.e. a credit card) that can process all of their content and subscription purchases in one bill.
Thus, as Ken fills in, based on his interviews: 
A reader/consumer’s "wallet" will fill up silently in the background — invisibly, you might say — depending how much value his attention to commerce is affording advertisers. Consumers won’t see these wallets, or how much content these value holders will offer them. Why? In showing actual value gained, consumers will try to 'game' the system.
But I say, "On the contrary!"

Hiding the wallet (ledger) seems inevitably to harm cooperation, loyalty, and willingness to pay a fair price for value -- the willingness to contribute funds that sustain the continuing creation of such value. The value of of a consumer's attention and how it affects the price they are asked to pay is secret??? How would that make you feel? Would you want to do business with a company that hides your account balance and history? a bank that wants to hide your balance from you?

Consumers will feel gamed, and that will lead them to feel justified in seeking to game the system against the publisher in return. They will seek to avoid paying a fair share -- or just not buy at all -- because they feel any publisher who is hiding this ledger of value exchanged is not playing fair with them. The same reason current experiments with dynamic pricing are hated so much -- it is done invisibly, often secretly, with no apparent justification -- just a devious game of extracting the most possible from one's wallet.

Visibly (= Transparently)

The publishing world (much like the larger business world) is recognizing the need to be customer-value-first -- to build a true "social contract" around their relationships and value propositions with their readers/members/customers. That requires transparency.

Most of the rest of what Ken reports of Invisibly seems to be a smart combination of many of the strategies of FairPay (an open architecture that I have proposed): flexible exchange of value personalized to individual reader behavior, based on "a new business model stack" that goes beyond "the binary subscribe/don't subscribe" model. An approach that seeks "a newer kind of advertising engagement" that is factored into a reverse meter to give credit for attention to ads. The difference is that FairPay seeks to transparently justify its new forms of personalized pricing -- doing it in ways that customers can participate in and recognize as fair -- not by "invisibly" imposing pricing that will seem arbitrary and exploitative.

"What will the readers think?"

As Ken pinpoints, the big question is one of "consumer acceptance and adoption." Hiding the accounting for the exchange of value seems bound to intensify the zero-sum conflict between publishers and their readers.

Maybe Invisibly can play its game cleverly enough to work better than the badly broken model we have now. There is much that is smart and forward looking here. But there is this fundamental turn toward the dark side...

A new logic (a new business model stack) that is win-win

Why not apply these sophisticated strategies in a more cooperative manner? It is time for publishers to embrace the idea that in our new world of digital, the only truly winning game is a win-win game with readers/viewers/customers. Many publishers are beginning to warm to that more customer-value-first logic. They should learn from what Invisibly has right, but in a way that is more transparent.

As I said in a LinkedIn message to Invisibly founder Jim McKelvey, "You seem to be on the right track, but with one more twist needed to be win-win. (Maybe Invisibly 2.0, if not now...)" I hope McKelvey and Invisibly's launch partners will look carefully at this issue, and realize that zero-sum games of hidden manipulation are not the way to sustain a publishing business. Invisibly seems an otherwise well-conceived and formidable effort to help publishers. But that needs to be done visibly and transparently.

In these times of existential threat to publishers -- in which both publishers and readers increasingly recognize a need for "a new social contract" that is win-win -- it would be a shame to turn publishers toward a darker direction that is in direct conflict with that. Invisibly seems to be smart, but what is needed is to be wise.

The only way publishers will find the new social contract needed to win with their customers in a scalable and sustainable way is visibly!

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For a full introduction to FairPay see the Overview and the sidebar on How FairPay Works (just to the right, if reading this at FairPayZone.com). There is also a guide to More Details (including links to a video).

Even better, read my highly praised new book: FairPay: Adaptively Win-Win Customer Relationships.


(FairPay is an open architecture, in the public domain.)

Monday, October 16, 2017

Thaler's Nobel, Surge Pricing, Fairness, and Long-Term Relationships

Some very nice insights on this theme are woven together in the latest Upshot reporting by Neil Irwin. It shows how Richard Thaler's behavioral economics adds deeper dimension to the debates about surge pricing -- and how that ties to underlying issues of fairness and long-term relationships, beyond the usual conflicting simplistic responses ("not fair"/"sound economics").

My congratulations to Thaler on winning the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics last week for his work in creating the field of behavioral economics. That is a key foundation for my work on FairPay, and I am very appreciative to have gained his encouragement, as noted below.

When we look beyond the surface, we see that fairness in long-term relationships is what really matters for economics to work well, and that leads to the values (fairness) that we all seek. Thaler developed behavioral economics to look deeply at those deeper issues of human value and behavior. FairPay makes that the center of an new logic for consumer commerce that is badly overdue in our new digital age.

Some relevant quotes from Irwin's article:
For artists, no one show exists in a vacuum. And the things that might maximize revenue for any given night might not be the elements that matter in the longer term in developing devoted fans.
...So one view of the Springsteen approach is that it is economically irrational. But another is that it is part of a long-term relationship between a performer and his fans.
...Utilities and regulators, in other words, have to think a little like Mr. Springsteen: It’s not just about maximizing the efficiency of the energy market on any one day, just as the Boss isn’t trying to maximize his revenue from any one concert. Rather, it’s about maintaining a relationship in which people do not feel like they have been exploited.
...People’s perceptions of what is fair and just are not set in stone; they evolve over time. But companies looking to use variable pricing have to be cognizant of how important it is to respect those perceptions.
...What the successful examples of variable pricing have in common is that they treat customers’ desire for fairness not as some irrational rejection of economic logic to be scoffed at, but something fundamental, hard-wired into their view of the world. It is a reality that has to be respected and understood, whether you’re setting the price for a highway toll, a kilowatt of power on a hot day, or a generator after a hurricane.
“If you treat people in a way they think is unfair, then it will come back and bite you,” Mr. Thaler said. And it doesn’t take a Nobel to understand that.

Numerous posts on this blog address similar underlying issues related to consumer perceptions of price discrimination (including surge pricing) -- and how a more enlightened variation that I call "value discrimination" can be very fair and broadly beneficial to consumers.

I was privileged to get Richard Thaler's attention and encouragement when I wrote to him in 2015 about how nudging is a key aspect of the FairPay strategy, referring to my blog post, How Consumers Can Nudge Corporations for Good (which commented on a piece by him in the NY Times). He then connected me to his colleague, Heather Caruso, executive director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Booth School. After some encouraging discussion, she indicated that their center would be interested in possibly being a resource for help in conducting experiments when a company is ready to do a trial.

With regard to trials, businesses, entrepreneurs, researchers, or others who might have interest in applying FairPay or related strategies are invited to contact me for pro-bono assistance. (FairPay is an open architecture in the public domain.)

More detail on how behavioral economics supports the strategies that underlie FairPay is in my earlier post, Thinking Fast and Slow about FairPay: A New Psychology for Commerce in a Networked Age, and in Making Customers Want to Pay You -- Research on How FairPay Changes the Game. (I previously had brief interchanges with Daniel Kahneman, the first winner of a Nobel for related work in behavioral economics, and author of Thinking Fast and Slow.)

We are just beginning to see the real world results of the more human side of economics that Kahneman, Tversky, and Thaler shined their light on.

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For a full introduction to FairPay see the Overview and the sidebar on How FairPay Works (just to the right, if reading this at FairPayZone.com). There is also a guide to More Details (including links to a video).

Even better, read my highly praised new book: FairPay: Adaptively Win-Win Customer Relationships.


(FairPay is an open architecture, in the public domain.)

Monday, October 9, 2017

WTF?: A New, Better, Warm-Blooded Capitalism -- Linking Profit to Human Values


We can start now, one company at a time. What company will take that step? -- to shift from the cold-blooded zero-sum logic of dinosaurs, to the more dynamic and cooperative logic of mammals? All it takes is one imaginative business to lead the way (most likely starting in digital).

I just finished an advance copy of Tim O'Reilly's important new book, WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us.* My focus was Tim's perspective on how we are now confronting "the beginning of the end of a failed economic theory," because my work on FairPay is aimed at a simple change in how we structure customer relationships that can enable individual companies to lead toward "an economy where people matter, not just profit."

Tim's WTF? provides a sweeping and insightful synthesis of how technology has been reshaping all aspects of our civilization -- not all for the best. It paints a compelling picture of the forces driving the problems we now face, and of the wide variety of hopeful vectors for change that are emerging. But it only hints at the idea that there are simple things that companies can do now on their own initiative (with the aid of consumer support) to begin to change the game unilaterally, in a way that can begin to shift perspectives more broadly. Just as Eastern sages say "there is nothing you must do first to achieve complete and perfect enlightenment," there is nothing we must do first to allow companies to align profits with human values (at least to a far greater degree than we do now, in some contexts).

First some initial comments on why Tim's book is important and compelling, then some observations on how FairPay highlights possibilities now at hand that promise to enable us to change direction even faster than Tim seems to suggest.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

Tim draws on his established position as thought leader with ties to the increasingly broad range of "alpha geeks" and entrepreneurs that have shaped our digital world, and his perspective as a publisher and communicator concerned about the broad human effects of technology on our civilization. He richly explores the double-edged effects of technologies such as platforms, automation, algorithms, and AI, and how they seem to be making life worse in many ways, even as they work miracles.

Tim makes his case in terms of a fitness function, the quantified objective function that guides the evolutionary optimization of an organism (or a system) to fit an environment. Through a wide range of contexts and examples, Tim suggests that we need to change the rules and incentives of our markets -- not only markets for goods and services but also financial markets -- and layers of internal and governmental rules that regulate them -- to better address the conflicts between people and profit, to turn the invisible hand to guide corporations fairly. On the long-term effects of algorithms and automation, he wisely observes that we need to not only manage these to protect and augment people (rather than simply replace them), but also to shift our focus to not simply protect jobs, but to the guide ourselves to the work that needs doing.

Tim points not only to emerging problems, but also to many signs of hope, and to how to build on that. He draws our attention to the many vectors of change (forces characterized by both intensity and direction) that shape the future. He points to both the urgent need, and the rich potential, that we have at this pivotal time, to remold the world closer to our heart's desire.

WTF?: What steps can a business take now to jump-start  that future?

My focus here is to synthesize and build on some of the vectors that are already pointing to ways to do this without waiting for systemic change in the underlying rules and regulations of our markets. There are already shoots we can build on, to work within the logic of our markets, to be more focused on human values.

There is nothing we must do first: we have already entered an age where profit can be increased by better serving customer values. Just be customer-value-first. 

What does that mean? Many businesses are realizing that it is not enough to be customer-centered (just seeking to extract maximum value from customers). We are entering an age of relationship capitalism -- most visibly in the emerging subscription economy where it is now understood that the key metric is not quarterly profit but customer lifetime value (CLV). Companies of all kinds are looking to customer journeys and loyalty loops, and seeing the need to be customer-value-first -- to work with each customer to maximize the value they perceive (and thus get the most from them in return). CLV is maximized when the company looks not to what its customers can do for it, but what it can do for its customers.

Value-based pricing has emerged in the B2B world as a way to align the business with the value it co-creates with its customers, to share fairly in that value surplus, and to drive that directly to the bottom line of pricing and thus profits. Less need for multiple bottom lines that tack on social values, if those values are priced in to the financial bottom line. Less need for external controls to manage externalities, if those are baked into value-based prices. Less conflict with investor demands, if prices and profits are aligned with customer values.

Translating that value mind-set into the B2C world has lagged because doing value-based pricing in a scalable way for mass-consumer markets has seemed so impractical that few even think about it. But we are seeing hints of a sea-change. Tim mentions Patreon and other new crowdfunding strategies for consumer funding of creation as "having a lot to teach us about [the economy's] future direction." Similar shoots can be seen in the move toward membership models in which readers fund journalism (or other services) that they care about. Behavioral economics has studied such participative pricing models (including the often-too-extremely customer-value-first model of pay what you want) to find that they are surprisingly effective, and that the classical economic model of a purely financially motivated homo economicus misses the actual behavior of real people. (Tim also mentions cooperatives, like the Green Bay Packers, REI, and Vanguard, and how they succeed at better aligning profit with human values.)

It is encouraging that a theoretical base for deep changes in corporate mind-set has been coalescing in the work of some marketing scholars and businesses who are re-examining the “goods-dominant logic” of the past, versus the “service-dominant logic” that we now are faced with. This meshes with recognition that value is not created by “producers” and purchased by “consumers,” but that “actors” in ecosystems work together to co-create value, which flows in multiple directions. Customer-value-first thinking is just one aspect of that (and platforms are another).

Tim quotes William Gibson, "The future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed." My work on FairPay seeks to build on these shoots of a more participative, win-win future, to drive simple changes to the structure of the game that a business offers to play with its customers, changes that can make that relationship far more cooperative in seeking a fair sharing of the business and consumer surplus.

FairPay and the invisible handshake

Tim describes how the invisible hand of competition in our markets does its work to balance supply and demand. The invisible hand works by rationing scarce supply against demand. But, increasingly, we have markets in which supply is not scarce, but essentially infinite (especially markets for digital goods and services). Furthermore, increasingly we expect our markets to work for goods and services that are not commodities, but experiences that have very different values to different people.

We still think with the economic logic of the invisible hand, but it no longer works so well in many domains (especially digital). For example, many digital businesses feel driven to create artificial scarcity, in an effort to prop up the invisible hand to maintain their profits under this obsolete fitness function. Customers easily see through that, and wonder why they should pay what is demanded (or anything at all) -- they resent being manipulated in ways that they see as patently unfair. Even publishers are realizing that information wants to be ubiquitous (except in special markets like time-sensitive financial information in which customers want scarcity and are willing to pay a premium for that). Furthermore, artificial scarcity is an enemy of the economies of scale that benefit business, customers, and society alike -- it limits the fruits of creation to those with high ability to pay.

Tim says "I am a strong believer in the social value of business done right. We should aim to build an economy in which the important things are a natural outcome of the way we do business, paid for in self-sustaining ways rather than as charities to be funded out of the goodness of our hearts." I agree completely -- that is the objective of FairPay.

Tim is concerned about how capital markets get distorted to focus on the narrow interests of shareholders (and management), and looks to ways to change that. That is a deep and urgent concern -- I do not mean to suggest any weakening of Tim's points regarding that. But I suggest there are complementary ways to make our fitness functions work better -- for businesses, customers, and society -- from inside our businesses, in the current market environment. Let's do what we can to change from inside, now!

FairPay builds on the recognition that many businesses are now much more strongly a matter of relationships. Subscription businesses are beginning to see that they are living a new kind of social contract with their customers. Customers rightly question why they should pay for existing content (since it can be provided at negligible cost). They understand what they need to pay for instead is the continuing creation of more such content. (The recent dramatic increases in news subscriptions is an example.)

A business applying FairPay makes this social contract explicit, in the form of a repeated game that motivates cooperation. "I will be more flexible (and give you more say) in how I price my services, as long as you are fair about paying for the value you receive" (as explained in FairPay Changes the "Game" of Commerce). Instead of an invisible hand, think of this social contract as an invisible handshake that drives pricing toward equitable sharing of the value surplus, however that varies in any specific context (including widely varying abilities to pay). (This is explained in An Invisible Handshake for The Digital Wealth of Nations and Harnessing the Demons of The Digital Economy.)

No one else needs to change any rules to apply this invisible handshake -- it is just a matter of a single business being clear about the structure and intent of the game it offers to play, and being smart about framing its offers, learning what the customer values and working to deliver it, and nudging the customer to accept and hold up his end of this social contract. This can be done in many market sectors, among selected segments of users who (1) value the service, (2) want more flexibility in pricing and offers, and (3) are willing to make an effort to be fair about it.

Businesses of all sizes using current emerging models like Patreon and membership are pointing in this direction already. (And effective SaaS platforms can facilitate this to make it easy for small businesses and even individuals -- with significant scale economies and data network effects -- a major entrepreneurial opportunity there! Think not just of CRM, but of pricing and relationships as a service.)

Tim emphasizes the importance of tight feedback loops to achieve fitness functions, and to ensure product-market fit. FairPay is driven by an adaptive feedback loop that underlies every touch-point between the customer and a business and its products/services, to seek to jointly measure and maximize value at all levels -- as both the business and customer agree to define it.

Tim explores the dark side of business models that seek engagement (like Facebook and other ad- or commerce-driven businesses). FairPay fosters a form of consumer engagement that is win-win for all of us.

Tim suggests thinking of the economy as a game. FairPay shifts our micro-economics to see commercial relationships as a repeated game that works not for single transactions, but over a relationship, to align business and customer incentives to produce what we want, when and how we want it, for everyone who values that -- and to divide the surplus value so that both profit well from doing that. That harnesses the law of attractive profits to incentivize companies to profit from competing on creating customer relationships that maximize human values. That in turn leads to a macro-economics in which bottom-line revenues and corporate profits correlate with the creation of real human value.

A vector to broader human values (and other WTF? improvements)

Taking this farther will take skill and continuous learning and refinement, but, if done with care on the part of the business, customers will increasingly see that it delivers the value they seek, on terms they are be happy with. That value can include not only the narrow aspects of value addressed by the invisible hand, but whatever human and social values the customer wants to factor in (including people, planet, and purpose, to the extent the business will agree that is reasonable).** All of the vectors that Tim describes support and facilitate moving in this direction. Early success will lead to wider use across broader segments of consumers. Even costly real goods can be partly amenable to this logic, especially if they are based on human creative work (which Tim points to as another important vector).

Seeing this invisible handshake work will help create a climate for the more broadly systemic changes in business (and how it is regulated) that Tim points to. Businesses and the capitalist system will find themselves driven closer to our heart's desire. That will reduce the need for external remedies, and will create a more cooperative climate in which those remedies that are still needed will be seen as less objectionable.

...All it takes is one company to give this a try. (...Maybe O'Reilly Media?)

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On a personal note -- as one who has spent his career watching, developing, forecasting, and inventing the future since the 1960s -- I very much relate to Tim's perspectives. I hope many will think seriously about this future and "why it is up to us." Now, more than ever, our future depends on that.

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For a full introduction to FairPay see the Overview and the sidebar on How FairPay Works (just to the right, if reading this at FairPayZone.com). There is also a guide to More Details (including links to a video).

Even better, read my highly praised new book: FairPay: Adaptively Win-Win Customer Relationships.


(FairPay is an open architecture, in the public domain.)

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*A preview of WTF? is provided in Tim's August post on Medium (which I commented on). A sample chapter is also available. Publication date is tomorrow, 10/10/17.

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**[UPDATE -- comment from Tim O'Reilly] 
Thanks very much Tim!  To your very relevant point of concern, I should expand on how FairPay enables customers to have a much greater say about that...

FairPay seeks to define value to "include not only the narrow aspects of value addressed by the invisible hand, but whatever human and social values the customer wants to factor in (including people, planet, and purpose, to the extent the business will agree that is reasonable)."

When pricing is sufficiently participative, through a process like FairPay, customers can nudge businesses to have their price factor in whatever aspects of value they want it to include. That can be soft customer values like service and support, but can also include broader social factors like how a company treats its employees, sources its goods, supports its community, and protects the environment. It can include bonuses to journalists or musicians or other contributors. It can factor in credits for being a good corporate citizen (much as some companies already enjoy a level of premium pricing because of their good reputation), and, conversely, can factor in debits for bad behavior (much as the market now punishes known bad actors). Just as old fashioned negotiation or tipping often factor in such broader considerations, the new invisible handshake of FairPay can do that in a way this is more explicit and powerful.

This is not to suggest such "customer nudging for good" will fully address all important aspects of human and social values, but that it can lead to enough of a shift in how prices reflect such values to have dramatic effect -- and thus can reduce the need for external measures (and "multiple bottom lines").

This is expanded on in my post, How Market Commerce Can Become More Cooperative, Fair, and Human.

[UPDATE 1/16/18] 
An interesting complement to WTF? is Niall Ferguson's new book, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook. It provides interesting historical perspective, which I explore and expand on in a review on my other blog: "The Square and the Tower" — Augmenting and Modularizing the Algorithm (a Review and Beyond)

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

No, Peggy, That is Not "All There Is" to News Reader Revenue!

In his Newsonomics series, Ken Doctor asks "is that all there is to reader revenue?" -- and reviews some signs of hope that there is more. I suggest there is actually much more -- because we are just beginning to rethink our value propositions for the strange new world of digital.

In homage to Peggy Lee's classic song, "Is that all there is?," Ken asks that specifically as it relates to "Who killed the new subscriber?" He answers that while we still hear Peggy's heartbreak, "we can also hear...the hum of new reader revenue strategies." He finds reason to be hopeful in the variety of emerging new models, but describes serious difficulties and gaps that leave a "great potential in-between." He ends on a more hopeful note from another Peggy Lee song, "somebody loves me, I just wonder who."

So the question is: how can I as a publisher get more people "to love me?" What Ken's review makes clear (in that article and its companion) is that we seem to be stuck with narrow point solutions that each address a segment of the market for a given publisher:

  • publisher paywalls that work marginally well for the most dedicated 1-4% of readers (at least for national/global news leaders, not so well beyond that), 
  • platform-based alternatives (including nascent platforms like Scroll, LaterPay, and Blendle, and, less satisfactorily, Google and Facebook) that seek to attract casual readers, 
  • but very little to address the missing middle. 

There is much ingenuity going into alternative models to address parts of this gap, but still, they are point solutions. Ken talks of going beyond "the binary world of pay/don't pay." He quotes Cosmin Ene of LaterPay: “Walking the walk would require a diversified approach to monetizing content, allowing individual sales and time-based models and not just trying to push towards subscriptions only. There is a whole universe living between ads and subscriptions.” True, but is this just a wider range of point solutions? Isn't there a more coherent solution? ...one family of solutions that can effectively serve a wide range of readers all the way from casual to dedicated? ...one that keeps publishers in a relationship with their readers all the way through each reader's life-cycle (the funnel into the loyalty-loop) as it grows (or not)?

How to get more readers "to love me"

To deal with this whole universe of readers in a coherent and effective way, publishers need to deeply rethink the fundamental economics and value propositions that underlie their relationship with each reader.

  • The problem underlying this narrow market for reader payments is not an inherent refusal to pay for news, but a problem of value propositions -- resulting from the rigidity of one size fits all pricing
  • For publishers it is a high all you can eat price, for Scroll it is a standard $5 shallow dive, up to the meter -- and for LaterPay and Blendle it is a high set price per article. 
  • Both publisher and Scroll subscription solutions may be bargains to some (not good for the publisher), but overpriced for many (also not good for the publisher, since readers cancel or never even subscribe), depending on usage any given month -- and LaterPay and Blendle are not very fair to any reader.
  • The "binary world of pay/don't pay" ignores the willingness of some (but not all) readers to accept some ads -- if they add value rather than subtract it, and if they get credit for their attention.
  • Adding a broader array of distinct point solutions will just confuse everyone.

Scroll and publisher subscriptions are nicely complementary, but both take a narrow approach to matching the price to an individual reader's value proposition. Scroll has a strategy that seems promising for the low side of usage, and publisher subscriptions are more or less workable at the high side, but, as Ken makes clear, both leave a big value-pricing gap in the middle. I suggest more variably-priced models are now workable and could be efficient and attractive across the full spectrum of usage.*

A more economically efficient solution would factor in usage -- not at a fixed price for any given article like LaterPay or Blendle, but rather, on a discounted sliding scale. Undiscounted per-article pricing makes consumers very fearful of the ticking meter, because it leads to overpricing and nasty usage shocks (which is why classic micropayment models have a history of failure). Conversely, even Spotify and Netflix (which publishers look to with envy) find that all you can eat subscriptions are underpriced for heavy users, and overpriced and shunned by many would-be casual users. That inefficiency is costly all around.

Why not a sliding scale of volume-discounted prices? Small numbers of articles would be at a relatively high unit price (much like LaterPay and Blendle, but preferably not that high), but increasing numbers of articles can be discounted to gradually approach the price per article that applies to a subscription -- less at moderate usage, but comparable at high usage. (And there could be price caps to avoid high-usage surprises.) Variable pricing may seem complex, but it can be made simple enough -- another post explains how this could be done for the very similar case of TV bundles.

This is really just a matter of value-based pricing, and of publishers taking more of the pricing risk from their readers. That will take new thinking and experimentation, but those risks are not really as great as the risk of not learning to apply a customer-value-first approach (for all of the reasons Ken outlines). The modern technology of customer journeys now makes personalized pricing very workable.

A shift toward more flexible pricing can also bring other important aspects of value and ability to pay into the picture -- to make prices fair for the fullest range of readers. Those who get high value and those who have high ability to pay can be reasonably expected to agree to pay more than those who get less value and who have lower ability to pay. Those willing to pay attention to acceptable levels of ads should reasonably expect a credit for that. Since replication of news is nearly free, the real objective to to get readers to sustain more creation -- and every contribution helps. Behavioral economics shows that people understand and respond cooperatively to that kind of logic -- if pricing is value-based, transparent, and framed properly. The FairPay strategy outlined on this blog points to new ways to do that efficiently on mass scale.

Love is a two-way street

Do better at offering each reader the value they want, at a fair price for each of them, and maybe publishers will find much more often that "somebody loves me."

After all, pricing, like love, is "a two-way street" (more songs). If you want someone to love you, you must think not of what they can do for you, but of what you can do for them. You must view your customer relationships (and how they center on value) through the eyes of the customer. Publishers still have far to go toward a customer-value-first mind-set, but the general direction is clear.**

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For a full introduction to FairPay see the Overview and the sidebar on How FairPay Works (just to the right, if reading this at FairPayZone.com). There is also a guide to More Details (including links to a video).

Even better, read my highly praised new book: FairPay: Adaptively Win-Win Customer Relationships.



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*Set pricing is a relic of the age of physical newspapers -- now obsolete. Readers got entire newspapers delivered (or at a newsstand). (And a few other readers bought single article reprints.) Not much opportunity there to price based on personalized value. But now news is an experience good, accessed on-demand from the cloud, in highly individualized usage patterns that are tracked in great detail. Value is much more highly variable, and no longer hard to determine.

**Another hint of progress is in the Google announcement yesterday about their efforts to cooperate with publishers on more flexible and simple subscription models. The Times quotes Google as moving from "one-size-fits-all" models, and as "looking at ways to help people subscribe to publications more easily, including using machine learning to help publishers tailor options to a reader’s preferences and behavior." But again, the big question is whether this gets applied with a publisher-first mind-set, or the customer-value-first mind-set that is really needed.