Loud

I’ve been annoying people on twitter with incessant verbiage. I thought I might as well turn them into blog posts to annoy you as well.

• It’s hard to know what to make of the delusion that you can’t charge money online, it’s wrong on so many levels.

• It’s wrong even if we accept the idea that they’re specifically talking about digital wares and disregard the entire ecommerce sector.

• I work for a software company. Not the best in our niche but we do all right.

• The entire software industry, outside of Adobe and Microsoft, is online and digital only.

• The claim, rephrased, is really that it’s really hard to charge money for content and web apps online. Which is true and still deluded.

• Most web apps and content online are leisure time products, they don’t address pain points or solve problems.

• It’s really hard, online or off, to charge money for leisure products. The clientele tend to be teenagers, who don’t have credit cards.

• The rest will use it if it’s free but balk at paying. Those who would pay—teenagers—can’t.

• News doesn’t solve a pain point and is about as relevant to the modern day-to-day life as gossip and American Idol. In most cases you’re not going to suddenly become worse at your job if you don’t follow the news.

• As far as I can tell the content companies or publishers are assuming that they can just transfer their usual modus operandi online. The inherent assumption is that people want the same thing online as offline, just with more ‘digital’ sprinkled on top.

• None of them is going through the essential customer discovery process to find out what, if anything, people will pay for online.

• Except for Harlequin publishing and O’Reilly, which are exceptional in how in touch they are with their community of customers, and Harlequin has very avidly been experimenting with online and digital specific publications.

• If my hypothesis is right, that in most cases it’s teenagers who are willing to pay for content online but can’t … then that is something that can be addressed through innovation (e.g. SMS short codes, iTunes store, etc. etc.)

• But it would need to be confirmed through research first, because otherwise you’re wasting time solving a non-existent problem.

• Which reminds me … you could do a lot of analysis on the roles of publishers, artists and Amazon/Apple in terms of John Hagel III and John Seely Brown’s sustainable edge theory, i.e. publishers mistakenly think that their should be involved in the creation of the product.

• But the role they play, that the other participants can’t do, is in customer discovery, validation and community/relationship building.

• Harlequin and O’Reilly are a start, but they are leveraging their existing communities and relationships. Publishers need to do much more.