When the price of your digital product is zero, that’s about how much you learn about customer pricing. Now, both the pricing and the learning is on the upswing.

The pay-for-digital content revolution is now fully upon us. Five years ago, only the music business had seen much rationalization, with Apple’s iTunes having bulled ahead with its new 99-cent order. Now, movies, TV shows, newspapers, and magazines are all embracing paid digital models, charging for single copies, pay-per-views, and subscriptions. From Hulu Plus to Netflix to Next Issue Media to Ongo to Press+ to The New York Times to Google Play to Amazon to Apple to Microsoft (buying into Nook this week), the move to paid media content is profound. The imperative to charge is clear, especially as legacy news and magazines see their share of the rapidly growing digital advertising pie (with that industry growing another 20 percent this year) actually decline.

Yes, it’s in part a 99-cent new world order as I wrote about last week (“The Newsonomics of 99-Cent Media“), but there are wider lessons — some curiously counterintuitive — to be learned in the publishing world. Let’s call it the newsonomics of Pricing 101. The lessons here, gleaned from many conversations, are not definitive ones. In fact, they’re just pointers — with rich “how to” lessons found deeper in each.

Let’s not make any mistake this week, as the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s new numbers rolled out and confounded most everyone. Those ABC numbers wowed some with their high percentage growth rates. Let’s keep in mind that those growth numbers come on the heels of some of the worst newspaper quarterly reports issued in awhile. Not only is print advertising in a deepening tailspin, but digital advertising growth is stalled. Take all the ABC numbers you want and tell the world “We have astounding reach” — but if the audience can’t be monetized both with advertising and significant new circulation revenues, the numbers will be meaningless.

When it comes to dollars and sense, pricing matters a lot.

Let’s start with this basic principle: People won’t pay you for content if you don’t ask them to. That’s an inside-the-industry joke, but one with too much reality to sustain much laughter. It took the industry a long time to start testing offers and price points, as The Wall Street Journal and Walter Hussman’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette provided lone wolf examples.

The corollary to that principle? If you don’t start to charge consumers — Warren Buffett on newspaper pricing: “You shouldn’t be giving away a product that you’re trying to sell.” — then you can’t learn how consumers respond to pricing. Once you start pricing, you can start learning, and adjust.

We can pick out at least nine emerging data points:

• 33-45 percent of consumers who pay for digital subscriptions click to buy before they ever run into a paywall. That’s right — a third to a half of buyers just need to be told they will have to pay for continuing access, and they’re sold. As economists note that price is a signal of value, consumers understand the linkage. Assign what seems to be a fair price, and some readers pay up, especially if they are exposed to a “warning” screen, letting them know they’ve used up of critical number of “free” views. Maybe they want to avoid the bumping inconvenience — or maybe they just acknowledge the jig’s up.
• If print readers are charged something extra for digital access, then non-print subscribers are more likely to buy a digital-only sub. Why pay for digital access is the other guys (the print subscribers) are getting it thrown in for “free”? Typically, Press+ sees a 20-percent-plus increase in signups on sites that charge print subscribers something extra. That extra may be just a third or so of the price digital-only subscribers pay (say, $2.95 instead of $6.95), but it makes a difference. Consequently, Press+ says 80-90 percent of its sites charge print subscribers for digital access. The company now powers 323 sites and thus has more access to collective data than any other news-selling source.
• You can reverse the river, or at least channel it. The New York Times took a year, but figured it out righter than anyone expected. It bundled its Sunday print paper (still an ad behemoth) with digital, making that package $60 or so a year cheaper than digital alone. The result, of course, is that Sunday Times home delivery is up for first time since 2006. It’s not just NYT or the L.A. Times which have embraced Sunday/digital combos. In Minneapolis, the Star Tribune began a similar push in November. Now, of its 18,000 digital-only subscribers, 28 percent have agreed to an add on the Sunday paper, for just 30 cents a week, says CEO Mike Klingensmith (“A Twin Cities turnaround?”). So we see that consumers may well be more agnostic about platform than we thought. Given them an easy one-click way of buying even musty old print, and they will. Irony: If you hadn’t charged them for digital access, you probably wouldn’t have sold them on print.
• New products create new markets. 70 percent of The Economist‘s digital subscribers are not former print subscribers, says Paul Rossi, managing director and executive vice president for the Americas. That’s surprising in one sense, but not in another. Newspaper company digital VPs will tell you that they’re surprised to see how little overlap there is between their print audience customer bases and their digital ones. The downside here: Many print customers seem not to value digital access that much. The Star Tribune is finding a low take rate of 3 percent of its Sunday-only print subscribers willing to take its digital-access upsell. One lesson: The building of a new digital-mainly audience won’t be easy and will require new product thinking; it’s not that easy just to port over established customers.
• The all-access bundle must contain multiple consumer hooks. Sure, readers like to get mobile access as well as desktop and print, and maybe some video. Yet some may especially prize the special events or membership perks they are offered, as the L.A. Times is banking on (and start-ups Texas Tribune, MinnPost, and Global Post have applied outside the paywall model). Some will like the extras, like The Boston Globe telling its new 18,000 digital subscribers, as well as its print ones, that they now get “free” Sunday Supper ebooks (“The Newsonomics of 100 Products a Year“). Sports fanatics or business data lovers will find other niches to value — and ones that make the whole bundle worthwhile. Archives — and the research riches they offer — will prove irresistible to some. In 2012, a bundle may offer a half dozen reasons to buy, casting a wide net, with the hope that at least one shiny lure will reel in the customers. By 2013, expect “dynamic, customized offers,” targeting would-be buyers by their specific interests to be more widely in use.
• While pageviews may drop 10-15 percent with a paywall, unique visitors remain fairly constant. We see the phenomenon of those who do hit a paywall one month coming back in subsequent months, rather than fleeing forever. “It may be the second, third, or fourth month before someone says, ‘I guess I am a frequent visitor here, and I’ll play,’” says Press+’s Gordon Crovitz.
• Archives find new life. Archives have lived in a corner of news and magazine websites for a long time. They’ve been used, but not highly used or highly monetized. Now, courtesy of the tablet, and a new way to charge, The Economist is finding that 20 percent of its single copy sales are of past issues. Readers will pay for the old in new wrappers, whether back e-issues, or niched ebooks. The all-access offer can be much wider than cross-platform, or multi-device. It can extend across time, from a century of yesterdays to alerts for tomorrow.
• News media is probably underpriced. Take the high-end Economist. CEO Andrew Rashbass — speaking to MediaGuardian’s Changing Media Summit 2012, in a recommended video — said that a survey of its subscribers showed that a majority didn’t know how much they were paying for the Economist. When pressed to guess, most over-estimated the price. At the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, an early paywall leader in the middle of America, a recent price increase to $8.99 from $7.99 has so far resulted in no material loss of subscribers. At Europe’s Piano Media, early experience in Slovakia and Slovenia is that price isn’t a big factor, says Piano’s David Brauchli. “Payment for news on the web is really more a philosophical mindset rather than economic. People who are opposed to paying will always opposed to paying and those who see the value of paying don’t mind paying no matter what the price is.” That suggests pricing power. It makes sense that publishers, new to the pricing trade, have approached it gingerly. Yet the circulation revenue upside may well be substantial.
• Bundle or unbundle — what’s the right way? Mainly, we don’t know yet, and the answer may be different for differing audience segments. The Economist started with print being a higher price than a separate digital sub. Then it raised the digital price to match that of print — to assert digital value. It now offers all-access: one price gets you both. Next up: You can buy either print or digital for the same price, but if you want both, you’ll pay more. It’s an evolution of testing, and so far, it’s been an upward one.

Overall, this is a revolution in more than pricing. It’s a revolution in thinking and, really, publisher identity.

The Boston Globe’s Jeff Moriarty sums it up well, as his company aims (as has the Financial Times before it; “The Newsonomics of the FT as an Internet Retailer“) to emulate a little digital-first company called Amazon:

I think overall publishers have to start thinking more like e-commerce companies. More like Amazon. You can’t just throw up a wall or an app and expect it to just sell itself. We’re still building that muscle here at the Globe, and some of our colleagues in the industry are even farther along. We have extensive real-time and daily analytics and are employing multivariate testing to try offers and designs to refine the experience that works best for each type of user.

Honk if you still love newsprint enough to pay $700 or more a year for a seven-day print subscription to The New York Times. Of course, you have many other choices.

You can try one of several print/bundled options for considerably less money. Or if you want to be parsimonious, you can get 10 free article views a month, or more if you want to work the social and search on-ramps to NYTimes.com. Maybe you want to be among those who pay Ongo $1.99 a month, and get 20 Times news stories a day, among lots of other news content.

Love the Guardian, and want to follow each tick of the U.K.’s Murdoch saga? If you’re in the U.S., you can subscribe to the lively iPad edition for $13.99 a month — or access it for free via the Safari browser on the tablet. In the U.S., its smartphone app is free, but in the U.K. and Europe, it requires a subscription. Of course, it’s quite successful Facebook app gives you access for free as well, anywhere.

If you’re shopping the Ongo news kiosk, look at wide spectrum of prices individual publishers are charging for access through that product: The Guardian is 99 cents a month, The Christian Science Monitor is $3.99, while the Chicago Tribune is $9.99 and The Boston Globe $14.99.

It’s not just newspaper companies that offer a patchwork of buying (or not buying) choices.

Are you a late-arriving fan of AMC’s series “Breaking Bad”? If you want to catch up and subscribe to Netflix streaming, you’ve got a good deal at the $7.99 a month rate. Cram in the first three seasons’ 37 episodes in a single month (where did that month go?), and you’ll pay just 21.5 cents per show, and anything else you have time to watch is gravy. Ah, but if we want to watch Season 4, which you can’t yet see on Netflix streaming, you have to upgrade to those red envelopes and get Season 4 DVDs — but it’ll cost you another $7.99 a month, and you’ll have to wait until the DVDs are released in June. (Ah, maybe that’s one of the reasons Netflix’s maladroit move to streaming is pushing it to a loss.)

Or you can turn to Amazon VOD and get the episodes for $1.99 each (or $2.99 in HD!), or $25.87 for the season. Or why stream when you own the DVD in a few weeks for $29.99 (or add an extra 10 bucks for added Blu-ray clarity). But wait — I’m an Amazon Prime customer. Can’t I watch it for free? It’s not part of the Prime free streaming offer, but I can watch a whole lot of other stuff as often as I want for nothing. Or maybe I can access “Breaking Bad” through Comcast’s Xfinity $100-a-month plus service. Nah, no deal — “Breaking Bad” isn’t available.

One more try: on the AMC site itself, there’s quite highlights, blogs, and more on the series, but no full episodes.

Let’s add in music.

Take Tristan Prettyman. It’s $9.99 (or 83 cents a song) for her last CD on iTunes. Through my $36 annual ad-free Pandora subscription, I can listen to dozens of her songs, her musical soundalikes, and thousands of other tunes in a year, bringing down the cost to pennies per song. Or there’s Spotify, where her songs are available for either zero, five, or ten bucks a month, depending on what devices I want to use and whether I can stand ads.

Magazines, of course, are offering their own split-screen experiments. The U.S. magazine industry (“The Newsonomics of Next Issue Media’s All-You-Can-Eat Kiosk“) is testing the all-you-can-eat, cross-title buffet, bringing some its titles down to as long as 37 cents a month (if you consumed all 27 “basic” titles) through the kiosk, but $39, or $59, or $79 a year if you buy a single title directly through a publisher.

How much to charge?

It’s a fool’s paradise of pricing out there in the digital world, right now, at least for wily consumers. The Department of Justice’s ebook suit and related settlements only complicate things. Five and ten years ago we were wondering whether people would ever pay for digital media — Newsweek’s Steven Levy took us into the terra incognita in “Meet the Napster Generation” back in 2000. But now the question isn’t whether people, young and old, will pay — it’s how the hell to figure out how much to charge them throughout what we politely like to call our multi-platform world.

Content no longer demands to be free. It wants a fee — but how much of one?

Consumer pricing is not a core competence of many media companies. For decades, media pricing was on automatic. Newspapers picked a quarter or fifty cents, and then re-programmed the coinboxes. Magazines kept prices low enough to build audiences to reap substantial ad rewards. Book publishers did some minor stratification. Music companies picked a couple of price points, and let the vinyl and CDs fly.

In the digital era, though, pricing is confronting — and confounding — media companies. Just what in the digital world of vanishing manufacturing costs is digital media worth? Now with those 20th-century costs — printing, manufacture, distribution, shipping — passing into the night, the question of price, and value, is making itself loudly heard.

We can certainly identify the wrong-headedness of the Department of Justice’s price-fixing suit against book publishers and/or point out how the DOJ had little choice in pursuing the case, neither of which is a surprise. The law has struggled unsuccessfully to keep up with business changes wrought by the Internet, from fair use to antitrust to media monopoly. Oft-earnest American regulators find themselves falling farther and farther behind, trying to track technology’s dominating nature and make new sense of it. Often, European Union regulators take a more forthright stab but end up retreating.

Create a new legal framework that better balances producers, distributors, and consumers? Forget about that in this age of politics where stalemate and status quo is the order of the day.

Publishers of all media are on their own, then, and they’d better make sense of pricing. It’s core to their survival and future sustainability. Sure, the Amazons of the world will try to monopolize book pricing, returning closer to its pre-”agency pricing” market share of 90 percent from its current paltry 60 percent. Yet, publishers — especially of news and feature media, news organizations and “magazine media” — have many pricing plays to try as customers discover content near and far from traditional outlets.

The magic of a good price point

I’ll call this the newsonomics of 99-cent media because that’s the world into which we have moved. Today let’s look at that 99-cent model, and next week we’ll delve into the early lessons that pricing’s practitioners have stumbled across as they’ve moved into paid content.

At first, it looks like a tyranny of 99-cent pricing (or the parallel expected tyranny of $9.99 Amazon book pricing). Will 99-cent pricing cause brand damage? Will it last? If the U.S. follows Canada and forsakes the penny, then the 99 cent pricing may fall into history. For now, though, it’s got a certain consumer magic.

“Ninety-nine-cent introductory offers have done wonders for take rates,” says applied economist Matt Lindsay, president of Mather Economics. His company has worked with more than 200 titles — about 75 percent of them newspapers — on pricing and related strategic issues. Take a look across media pricing, from The New York Times to Hulu Plus, and 99 cents (or its derivatives of $1.99 to $7.99 to $9.99) are everywhere.

Take rate is simple: What percentage of customers click yes — and provide precious credit card data — when confronted with an offer. Offer readers the ability to start a “trial” for 99 cents, and you’ll see results two to three times any other number, says Lindsey. At 99 cents, readers “take that as a signal. They understand that you want them to adopt this product. By setting the full price at a high number, you are basically saying, ‘This is the true value of the product.’”

Steve Jobs understood signaling in a parallel way. As Chris Anderson described well in Wired last November (“The Magic of 99 Cents”), one of Jobs’ great successes with iTunes and the iPod was that 99-cent pricing for songs. He could get the hardware and software right, but in the not-quite-post-piracy age, 99 cents was the third leg of the value equation. It worked as a signal: somewhere in between free and too much.

Start with 99 cents and you can conquer the world. As they set off on that quest, what are some of the pricing guideposts for publishers?

• 99 cents is a beginning and not an end. For newspapers used to being paid $200 or $400 a year, 99 cents seems like a declaration of cheapness. Put some round 0s on pricing; it just seems more honest. The oft-cited example of Louis CK’s $5 video is a case in point. Five bucks says authenticity. Yet media that answer thousands of reader questions every day aren’t comedians. Just because you set an intro price of 99 cents, the down-the-road price sends thatother important signal to value. Ultimately, says Lindsay, it’s true that “people take price as a signal to quality.”
• If you have lots more to sell, then 99 cents isn’t a price, it’s a price of admission. Responding to my recent column about ”small things” adding up, Rob Pegoraro asked, on Twitter, how The New York Times’ earnings results related to the notion. “I think NYT 454K dig subs become great market for ‘small things’ like ebooks, events+,” I responded. David Johnson then added, “You pay to be in a market. These business plans resemble theme parks and non-profit fundraising strategies.” That thought fits perfectly here: it’s not about the money, large or small, an even buck or 99 cents — it’s about establishing a new relationship. Or, to use the vernacular, 99 cents is gateway-drug pricing.
• Get ready to sell lots of stuff. So if you are Six Flags, or The New York Times or the L.A. Times, you’d better be able to leverage that new relationship by selling lots of stuff. Maybe not yet 100 products a year, but at least a half dozen to start. Ebooks, of course, fit perfectly here, as add-on products offered to members or subscribers. Sure, use some, as The Boston Globe is doing with Sunday Suppers, to reinforce subscriber/member value. But price others to match potential value. A guide to Boston-area colleges from, who else, the Globe, could be a $19.95 solid seller, given the $100,000-plus parental investment ahead. “Ebook,” though, is much too limited a name to put on it, and sounds like something not current. Wonderfactory founder and creative director David Link made this basic but hugely important point when we talked last week: There really isn’t a fundamental difference between an app and an ebook. “From an agency and a technology’s point of view, it’s only in how you create them. Talking about a recent product Wonderfactory worked on, “You go to the ebookstore, and it’s just text. You go into the app store and it’s got the text with 50 percent app-like sauce.” So, right now, publishers and their creative people are having to create multiple forms, but essentially the same product is both an app and an ebook. The technologies, and the costs, will clarify, as will the marketplaces for all the digital paraphernalia of our lives. The point for publishers selling more stuff is clear though: solve audience needs better than someone else, create products for the devices of the day, and price accordingly.
• It’s not just the content we’re paying for. That’s a tough, tough lesson for literal newsies. As with the music revolution Apple wrought, it was the combination of convenience, ease, presentation, pricing, and wonder that rationalized (for good and bad) the digital music industry. Today’s first batch of digital news subscriptions rely as much on convenience and mobility values as they do on the words and pictures.
• We’re all in the same business. Think of your own media purchases. A little music, more and more video, selective news and magazine subscriptions, increasing numbers of ebooks. Yes, the marketplaces for ebooks and apps, alongside this kiosk and that e-store, are confusing. Media, though, is media, and the pricing schemes are forming in a remarkably similar way across movies, music, newspapers, and magazines. We all like, for instance, the notion of All Access; we’ll pay once and get our stuff everywhere. So news and magazine publishers must look through the assorted lessons of the music and movie industries, those lessons still in much progress. News pricing is not an island.

So what is it? iTunes for magazines? Maybe Hulu for periodicals? How about Piano Media for American titles? Tivo for print?

In the hurly-burly of digital content innovation and monetization, it’s hard to figure out what things are, so we try to find apt comparisons. With the new Next Issue digital newsstand, let’s think Netflix or Pandora or Spotify as the closest cousins. Next Issue, the offspring of five prosperous parents (Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp.), launched last night what I think will be a model-changing product for publishers.

In short, the Next Issue kiosk idea is transformative — though we’ll have to see how quickly customers take to its unknown brand.

It offers single-priced, all-you-can-eat access to top-shelf magazines, including Time Inc’s People, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time; Conde Nast’s Vanity Fair, Allure, and Conde Nast Traveler; Hearst’s Esquire and Popular Mechanics; and Meredith’s Better Homes and Gardens and Fitness. Thirty-two magazines in total, at launch.

Magazine publishers long eschewed the web as largely detrimental to their business, and they participated on it unevenly and haphazardly. Without the loss of classifieds threat experienced by their newspaper cousins, they could better afford to hold back, though many titles have seen a steady decline in both circulation and advertising revenues.

So when the tablet came along, they sniffed it with great interest. In terms of size, it looked like…a magazine. Sports Illustrated demoed it first and that WonderFactory-wow-of-a-prototype has generated 1.135 million YouTube views in three years. Since then, magazine publishers have moved faster than newspaper publishers to embrace the tablet. Some have told me they expect the tablet to grab a third or more of their print subscriber bases within two to three years. Many have put all-access pay-me-once subscription models into place, making it easy to pay for print and get tablet, too.

They’ve grumbled and growled about Apple’s onerous customer data and revenue sharing, but have moved ahead, in varying degrees with Apple’s Newsstand and other sales outlets. Additionally — and here’s the big difference with the newspaper industry — they pooled their efforts in Next Issue. That company is owned by the five behemoths, and it had difficult birth pangs. At times, it has seemed that Next Issue would become a side attraction (as so many publishing industry consortia become), just dabbling in the Android slice of the tablet market (though the slice is thickening).

Behind the scenes, though, it looks like Next Issue has become a major play of magazine publishers. Though the kiosk at launch only works with Android devices, expect iPads (and then iPhones) to be on board by late summer; Next Issue is about to offer up its product for Apple approval.

Non-Android users can get a sense of the product at Next Issue’s website, though the tablet, of course, is the best way to experience it, as Next Issue CEO Morgan Guenther affirmed yesterday in an interview: “It’s all about touching product.” Guenther, a former TIVO exec, is a West Coast guy, and interestingly Next Issue seems like a bi-coastal play.

Last June, Next Issue released some beta products, all in run-up to this kiosk. “In Silicon Valley, we call it beta. In New York [where most of his owners reside within a few dozen blocks of each other], they call it ‘preview release.’ Business operations are in New York, but it’s the 40-plus product people and engineers in Palo Alto that have worked to create this Next Issue experience.

“It’s all about the USP,” says Guenther. And you can’t have a unique selling proposition, if you don’t have a compelling, ahead-of-the-crowd customer experience. While I’m Android-less, there are a number of reasons to believe that Next Issue may have gotten the new product right, or at least, righter than many of the products or consumer propositions out there.

Let me outline seven things to watch as you take a look at Next Issue:

One way to read: Sign up once — and the new site is offering relatively generous 30-day trials — and you have but one navigation to learn. While the full content from each of the magazines is present, with added video, Next Issue says customers need only learn one way of getting around. If it’s an intuitive design, that’s a huge plus, as news- and feature-hungry readers find ourselves forced to learn the navigation nuances of each of our favorite apps.

One price: Well, almost. Next Issue’s pricing seems simple enough:

• Buy a single copy ($2.49-$5.99) of a magazine or a single subscription($1.99-$9.99 a month), and with the latter, access to growing archives that began Jan. 1, 2012.
• Buy one of two kinds of unlimited passes. For $9.99 a month, you get Unlimited Basic (think cable tiering). For $14.99 a month (or $180 a year), you get Unlimited Premium. At that tier, you get Times Inc’s Entertainment Weekly, People, Time, and Sports Illustrated — plus Conde Nast’s New Yorker.
• If you’re a print subscriber of an all-access-offering magazine, like Time Inc’s, you can get free access through the Next Issue site (and even if you’ve already “authenticated” through Time’s direct app). That kind of seamlessness is customer-pleasing.

The 32 launch titles are premium, not the low end of these publishers’ collections. Next up: adding more owners’ titles, and then non-owners’ magazines.

Newspapers? Well, maybe some, says Guenther. If so, think large regionals like the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, or Houston Chronicle, and not a proliferation of small, local paper apps. Not (yet) represented: Next Issue Media owner News Corp.’s The Daily, which as a magazine-like newspaper might fit in well here.

Revenue splits built on “engagement”: So Next Issue, for its work and investment will take a “industry standard” commission, which we can figure is in the 25-40 percent range. While Guenther won’t disclose the formula for divvying up the subscription revenues among publishers, he does say it will be built on “interaction by the consumer.” That sounds similar to what Piano has pioneered in sharing revenues by tracking actual reader usage of content. Consortia often fall apart on revenue sharing issues, so just getting an initial deal done is noteworthy.

New accommodations with Apple: Just as Netflix is newly playing with Apple and ponying up its commission cut, Next Issue looks like it will play along as well. The big reason: Next Issue owners have found, says Guenther, that most of their digital subscribers are new, non-print ones. With cannibalization of the print base less of an issue, paying a rev share to Apple becomes a less emotional cost of doing business.

Get ahead of Flipboard: It’s not a Flipboard-killer, but it’s intended to aggregate before tablet aggregators get the better of the aggregatees, as they’ve done on the web. Flipboard remains a superior browsing experience — cool, comfortable and serendipity-pleasing — and importantly offering a blend of changing content all within one interface. While Next Issue offers a single navigation, it’s not a blended product in the same sense that Flipboard is.

Down the road (how far will be the question), says Guenther, are the additions of search and personalization — and maybe, should the publishers allow it — cross-title topical bundles of health, fashion, or travel products. (Remember Mine magazine?) Should Next Issue continue innovating, combining the best of high-branded bliss with Flipboard fun, it could triumph. Flipboard, for its part, could still find a place in this adjusted ecosystem funneling some new (and younger) readers into Next Issue’s payment system, for a cut of the action.

It’s all a set-up for the print-to-tablet transition: So will a third of print magazine readers prefer the tablet sooner than later, as surveys seem to tell us? Readers love tablet magazine reading. If they transition quickly, and are paying subscribers, then the big business question is advertising.

Tablet ads continues to fetch rates (mainly for national publishers) five times or more greater than web ads. That differential may moderate, but the tablet’s immersive, customer-educating, consumer-grabbing capabilities offer major upside to advertisers and sponsors. It will take a couple to several years to reach some maturity, but the tablet ad ecosystem is developing quickly. Consider that earlier this week, we learned that both Hearst and Conde Nast will start releasing key-to-advertiser metrics on tablet usage, and that the Association of Magazine Media announced its own guidelines. The association goals: “to drive growth of advertising on tablets,” by providing data on:

1. Total consumer paid digital issues

2. The total number of tablet readers per issue

3. The total number of sessions per issue

4. The total time spent per reader per issue

5. The average number of sessions per reader per issue

In another words, just as Next Issue launches, the ad foundation is being thickly laid.

A model and a warning for the newspaper industry: In one sense, newspaper titles are very different than magazines. Other than the U.S.’s three national titles, newspapers are by nature local, appealing only to tiny slices of the national population. Yet in creating a single place to buy subscriptions, or single copies — and then potentially packages of content  (“The Newsonomics of 100 Products a Year“) — Next Issue is well ahead of the U.S. newspaper industry. Piano Media, in Slovakia and Slovenia and soon farther west, is testing the newspaper portal notion, with fledgling, if small-scale, success.

AP’s new mobile apps create a better national/local aggregation that its first-generation did, but they don’t lead to digital subs. Press+, with now more than 300 customers, has the capability to create a newspaper kiosk, but has seen little enthusiasm among its customers to do so.

One big question for Next Issue is who will notice it? It’s been a business-to-business brand largely. Consumers know how to buy magazines from magazine sites or from Apple or Amazon, but they don’t know much about Next Issue. That stealth position may be one of the reasons its publisher owners have gone forward with it.

They can hold onto, they think, their current print subscribers, transition them over to all-access over time, and use Next Issue — as it tests out new markets — to find new readers and customers.

So what is Next Issue? It is a Netflix wannabe, in the CEO’s vision. Visit, see a bunch of choices, queue ‘em up, and pay a single price for unlimited usage. It’s not iTunes with individual price points. It’s more like the Pandora or Spotify pay-us-once-and-forget-about-it model. And like all digital-native companies, it will focus as much on harvesting data on its customers and their usage, knowing that intel may be a large part of the company value going forward.

That makes consumer sense. It could make a lot of consumer sense.

Let’s recall the innovative New York Times paywall model. The Times priced digital + Sunday print $60 below digital only. That meant a significant number of new Sunday subscribers (home delivery Sunday subs went up for the first time in five years), but it also meant some number of seven-day print subscribers giving up the print habit for Sunday print + digital.

In the Next Issue case, well-magazine-read consumers may do the math and find the $180 a year premium bundle (all-you-can-read, including archives, of all the magazines in the kiosk), such a good deal that they’ll drop individual magazine subs. My first math shows that if you subscribe to seven or more titles, that price point may be economical, though if you get the Next Issue pass, you’ll be passing up the print editions of the magazines, which publishers are almost throwing in these days, à la NYT.

So we can see the planning in the pricing: preserve print if you can, bring in new digital-only customers, and then upsell those into print for as little as five bucks a year more.

Aggregation. Customer ease. Pricing that psychs out consumers. We see the makings of our new print/digital/print world.

Try this: Call up your local newspaper or online news organization. Tell them you want to buy something and ask them what they can sell you? Of course, at first, they’d be non-plussed: Sell you something? Then, after giving it some thought, they’d say you can buy a newspaper or a subscription or a membership — or, maybe, an ad? Would you like one of those?

Those days — mark it — are coming to an end. We’re on the brink of news companies producing hundreds of products for sale each year. While digital technology hath taketh (the easy ability to make money on news distribution), digital technology also giveth back, with the ability to create hundreds and thousands of newsy products at small incremental costs. The bonus: News organizations will be able to satisfy groups of readers and advertisers (often disguised thinly as sponsors) better than ever before. Double bonus: The let-a-hundred-products-bloom revolution fits neatly with the all-out embrace of all-access circulation initiatives, which news companies in North America, Europe, and Asia now can’t seem to implement quickly enough.

Can we call this the ebook revolution? Maybe, but that’s probably too narrow. Delivery of new products to new audiences can take several forms. A text-only ebook, a shinier iBooks-enabled product with video, or an app with all the glorious functionality apps offer. It’s not the form; it’s the content, content that satisfies niches rather than serves masses with one-size-fits-all newspaper or magazine products.

Call it the newsonomics of 100 products a year, or just one way to envision a much bigger future.

The 100-product-a-year model is a much-needed growth model. We can see how it fits nicely with all-access subscriptions, and together we have two interconnected Lego blocks of a new sustainable news model. We have two essential parts of a crossover model  (“The Newsonomics of Crossover“)  that I detailed here a few weeks ago. The big, hairy challenges of accelerating print ad loss and onerous legacy costs remain, but at least we’ve got a couple of building blocks we didn’t have two years ago. By we, I mean those of us who care about news and great professional content.

Is it a big moneymaker? We don’t know yet, though we can extrapolate some numbers below.

It’s directionally right, though, for at least a couple of strategic reasons. The notion of 100 smaller products reminds us that so much of the new world is based on volume. Google has built a monstrous advertising business on hundreds of thousands of smaller advertisers, while daily newspapers reaped huge profits on relatively few bigger advertisers. Even as movie watching by streaming surpasses DVD watching, more money is still in the old medium. Streaming will monetize at a lower rate, but end up generating bigger dollars over time. The same thing is true in the digital music business. Selling lots of stuff to lots of people at smaller price points is something the Internet enables superbly.

Yes, there are definitely new winners and losers in movies and music, as there will be in news. Those who transition best and fastest will win.

Second, it’s in line with the strategic push to satisfy the hell out of core customers. As publishers have figured out that it’s the top 15 percent of site visitors who make the big difference in building the new digital business — perhaps paying for subscriptions, consuming many more pages than fly-by users sent by Google — core customer satisfaction is key. Ebooks deeper the relationship to that reader customer.

This 100-product-a-year model may fit as well with the new California Watch/Bay Citizen combo (“The Newsonomics of the Death and Life of California News“), finalized Tuesday, as its does with The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Charlotte Observer, GQ, or Conde Nast Traveler.

Let’s take one example. On Wednesday, the Boston Globe launched “Sunday Supper & More.” It’s a cookbook. It’s New England. And it could be the beginning of a new franchise: Expect summer, fall and winter editions each year to join this spring debut. The Globe’s staff built it with Apple’s iBooks Author tool, so it offers video within it.

Want to buy it? Not so fast. Today, Sunday Supper & More is only available to Boston Globe print, all-access, and digital subscribers. So subscription — think “membership” (the recent riff of the L.A. Times new paywall intro) — is gaining new benefits. Surprise, says the Globe, you not only get our paper, our spiffy new replica-plus edition, if that’s what you want, and our mobile apps — you also get our cool cookbooks, with more to come.

The Globe will sell the book to non-subscribers — probably at $4.99 — but will decide the timing of that sale after next week’s Globe confab at which execs and editors will plot an ebook plan for the company.

“Events and ebooks will be the two biggest perks” of the new Globe subscription push, says Jeff Moriarty, the Globe’s VP of digital products. Beyond Sunday Suppers and a new spin on the Fenway 100 historical Red Sox book, we can picture the Globe soon mining its archives in both sports and features to provide new value for customers and a new leg of revenue. It experimented early with three books on its Whitey Bulger stories, and learned some lessons in pricing, distribution, and the technical creation process along the way.

The Globe has plenty of company in this push. We see Canada’s National Post committing to a couple of dozen ebooks in the coming year, again from hard news to features (“To learn what works (quickly), Canada’s National Post dives into ebooks”). Guardian Shorts is an early innovator; Politico is churning out four campaign ebooks this year.

Magazine publishers, faster than newspaper publishers to embrace the tablet as the next-gen platform, are also ahead of most newspaper publishers in ebooks. Vanity Fair’s done more than a half dozen, and its parent Conde Nast is hosting an explosion of more single-purpose apps in the iTunes Store, some unrelated to Conde’s magazines. Hearst’s Cosmopolitan is embracing ebooks, and now partnering, along with ProPublica — an early tester of ebooks — with Open Road Integrated Media . Open Road Integrated Media?

Well, it’s a book company, an ebook company juiced on the possibilities of our age. Headed by former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman, the company is prototypical of a new group of middlemen. With book marketing savvy (cover design, marketing, distribution+), these companies are now feeding the emerging ebook marketplace. They are also partnering back for that old standby, print, as Open Road has done with book services company Ingram. In Canada, it was Harper Collins Canada that became the National Post’s partner in bringing news ebooks to market.

Just as the web has knocked many middlemen for a loop, it creates openings for new ones.

If you talk to publishers about ebooks, they are farther along in experimenting than they were a year ago. Yet some basic issues — producing the books, marrying them to commerce engines, placing them prominently in e-stores and more — are giving them headaches as they push forward. “How do we make the right offer to the right person at the right time?” one experienced exec asked.

The marketplace has been exploding (recall that Amazon announced last spring that its ebooks were now outselling its paper books), but those issues are setting the stage for a new group of companies, many staffed with graduates of the book industry, offering their help. Newspaper and magazine publishers are looking to the Open Roads for guidance.

Some are turning to their digital circulation partner, Press+. That company, which is powering more than 280 titles’ subscription commerce, says its system can handle the commerce and even help with identifying likely customers, based on tracked content usage, so its customers are just beginning to ply the ebook trade.

ProPublica general manager Dick Tofel opted for Open Road for the non-profit investigative publisher’s fifth and sixth books. He says the company will start producing a half dozen or more a year now and is now fielding calls from other publishers eager to get the benefit of his early ebook experience.

So far, ProPublica has put 90,000 ebooks into the market. The first couple were free downloads, but with the addition of new original introductions to work ProPublica had already published free online, Amazon and ProPublica agreed on test pricing of 99 cents and $1.99, and new revenue is rolling in. It’s small, but “pound for pound, it generates more than advertising,” notes Tofel, who is a Wall Street Journal veteran. And, of course, the incremental cost of creating ebooks is closer to zero, with most sales cost able to be a commissioned cost of sale.

As assistant publisher, Tofel oversaw the print books business that’s been a good Dow Jones sideline for a long time.

Those books — personal investing and more — are naturals for the ebook revolution now. Look for the Journal to experiment more with those titles, perhaps niching by life stage.

As news and magazine publishers look to this new revenue stream, here are six points to ponder:

It’s about product development: Yes, it’s editing, but fundamentally, it’s a mindset change for many publishers stuck in the one-size-fits-all world. Publishers either need staffers with new product chops or partners wanting to license publisher content and create the products for the marketplace.

Free the archives!: Digital archives have never been a big business for publishers, caught somewhere between Google and musty library connotations. Packaged archives — for specific audiences — can offer new life for older content.

Don’t think content; think problem solving: Publishers too often start with content. If we start with audience — college-planning students and parents, new mothers and fathers to be, bored cooks, and, big time, sports enthusiasts of all ages — we can see the motors of ebook publishing beginning to role. Think life stage, just for starters, and add the geo angle, and regional publishers can play.

Mining the database: As onesies and twosies, it’s fairly easy to pick content from publishers’ own databases. Think of bigger production cycle, going beyond the 100 a year, to a thousand, all niched products that could be semi-automated and templated over time. Better tagging of content for ebook usage then becomes a priority.

Ebook or app?: Early experimenters say let the content be your guide. The more multimedia, the better an app may work. Ebooks, though, can be sold through more distributors, while Apple continues to dominate the app business.

Pricing: What’s an ebook worth? If it solidifies a subscriber/member paying $300 or more a year, it’s worth a lot, even if it’s free. Think of the lifetime value of that subscriber.

To the right niche, some ebooks will be worth $1.99 and others — Retina perfect — will go for $19.99. Let’s take our 100 products a year. Let’s average 5,000 sales for each. Let’s price at $2.99 on average. That would be $1.5 million. Some books, though, could be blockbusters. We can play with this math and see where it goes.

For the ProPublicas, it’s a nice non-ad revenue stream. For other publishers, it’s at least a growing third leg of revenue (beyond ads and circulation) and one that may be nurtured into something significant. (Last fall, Will Sullivan offered a gaggle of reasons ebooks make sense for publishers.) As importantly, it can reinforce those two legs, pleasing subscribers/members with free (or discounted) perks and advertisers/sponsors who have new opportunities to represent themselves to niche audiences. That’s a pretty good combination, and one that publishers will soon embrace, just as they lately have all-access digital circulation.

Related post: At Almost 400,000 Digital Subscribers, Inside the New York Times Pay Strategy, Year 2

What’s your signature content?

Quick: If somebody buttonholed you in an elevator, a school play, or a bar, and said, “Why should I pay you for that?” — what do you tell them?

Each passing week, it seems we’re further into the age of signature content. That only makes sense: If the death of distance is now old news, if everything is available everywhere at the touch of button or the swipe of a finger, then what makes any news or entertainment brand stand out amid this plague of plenty?

Closed systems — from three or four TV networks to less than a dozen big movie studios to a half-dozen major magazine publishers to geographically dominant newspapers — made signature content less important. Sure, big shows and big names have always driven media to some extent, but now, media without big names or big shows are going to get lost in the ether. Take Hulu’s announcement last week about Hulu Originals. You do have to wonder if Hulu’s fictional 13-episode “Battleground,” about a dysfunctional political campaign, will be bested by the Republican reality show in progress when the show debuts next month. Hulu is also bringing a Morgan Spurlock series for a second run, and probably will feature one other new program. The Hulu announcement joins Netflix’s own foray into signature content. Three years ago, would the thought of Netflix signing up Little Steven to do an original comedy series have crossed anyone’s imagination?

Hulu and Netflix both need to distinguish themselves in the market — not only from each other, but from Comcast, DirecTV, and Time Warner, among others. They need to buy protection as supposed masses consider cutting the cord on packaged services, Roku-ing and Apple-enabling Internet video onto their living-room screens. In movies and TV, we’re quickly morphing from a world of news and entertainment anywhere — get all of these things, somewhat haphazardly (Comcast Xfinity, for instance) on all of our devices — to one in which consumers ask, “What special do you have for me, in addition to my all access? Yes, All-Access, the cool feature of 2011, will quickly graduate from a wow to an expectation.

Why as consumers should we pay $7.99 (down from an initial $9.99) to Hulu Plus, when the same stuff (kinda sorta) is available through Boxee, or Apple TV, or Netflix, if I can find it? Why am I paying $7.99 a month (apparently the magic price of the moment) to Netflix for a catalog of films that is both voluminous and too often lacking what I want? Consumers are going to be asking that question a lot more.

Publishers, distributors, aggregators, and networks all want more money, and they’ve seen — courtesy of tablets and All-Access — that consumers are now more ready to pay for digital content than ever before.

Forget “content wants to be free.” Now content wants a fee. And everyone from Time Inc to The New York Times to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to Hulu’s co-owners (Fox, Disney, and Comcast) see gold. They see another digital revenue stream, in addition to advertising or to cable subscription fees. Yet they are increasingly believing they’ve got to up the ante (and Hulu is raising new funds to buy original programming) to compete and to win those consumer dollars.

News companies — at least one in ten U.S. daily newspapers and many consumer magazines — are rapidly embracing digital circulation revenue and All-Access. Yet results have been quite uneven. That makes sense: Consumers will pay for digital news, feature, and entertainment content, but they don’t want to overpay, and they’ll increasingly be forced to make choices. Buy this; let that go.

Let’s be clear. Paid media is paid media, and the original-programming pushes of the video companies have great meaning for news and magazine companies, global to local. For them, the calculus is similar. News and magazine brands can launch new products, though that’s out-of-their-DNA-tough for many. So they’ve focused primarily on sub-brands, many of which are people. These are the faces of news and magazines; many of these have become hot commodities over the last several years (“The Newsonomics of Journalistic Star Power“) as companies try to distinguish themselves — and give readers and viewers a reason to pick them out of the crowd.

How, though, can media companies afford to pay a premium for branded, promotable talent, talent that may open consumers’ pocketbooks? That’s easy: spend less on other content. So we’ve got the rise of user-generated content, obtainable free or cheap, and all kinds of new syndicate action from Demand Media to startup Ebyline (and maybe NewsRight), all trying to make it cheap and easy to get more medium- and higher-quality content more cheaply. What’s old is new again — as a young features editor, I got regular visits from syndicate and wire salesman, ranging from high-quality to the Copley News Service, that sold its stuff by the pound.

Another prominent model no news or magazine company can afford to ignore: The Huffington Post. Back to the early days when Betsy Morgan first teamed up with Arianna, HuffPost has worked this evolving content pyramid. At the top, a few highly paid site faces, many opinionated faces (some paid, most not), and then low-cost aggregation, much of it AP, headlined with the site’s recognizable swagger.

Then, of course, there’s the old standby: staff cutting. We’ve seen lots of staff cutting. In fact, these days, while we see some announcements like Media General’s big Tampa cut, most of the bloodletting is less public, but no less real. If you need to pay more to stars, and ad revenues are still declining, staff cuts of less than premium content (and those that produce it) make economic sense (“The Newsonomics of the New News Cost Pyramid“). It’s the new news math.

These newsonomics of signature content are getting clearer. Netflix is planning to spend 5 percent of its expenses — or $100 million a year — on original, Netflix-defining content. Hulu is spending about a quarter what Netflix’s total, or $500 million in total, on all content licensing this year. We don’t know how much of that is for original content, but observers believe “Battleground” will cost $15-20 million for its 13 episodes. With its other forays, it will probably spend closer to 10 percent of its content budget on original content.

Curiously, many newspaper newsrooms constitute only 10-20 percent of the overall expenses of a daily newspaper company. So we’re starting to see some new, and old, arithmetic play out here.

Simply, Andy Forssell, Hulu’s SVP of content, explained the cost/benefit ratio to Variety: “…having an original scripted series that hasn’t been seen anywhere else yet is considered the best tool for standing out with either advertisers or viewers.”

As usual, we see the bifurcation of the bigger national brands — those with more audience to gain and more money to spend — and local news brands. While many local newspapers have cut to the bone, with too much of the tissue in the form of experienced, name-brand metro and sports columnists cajoled or drummed into “early retirement,” we see increased branding of stars at places like Time, The New York Times, Fox News, and ESPN. The sports network may be the classic business model of our age, and in its anchors and top analysts — many initially lured from daily newspapers — it has shown the way for many years now.

At the Times, consider business editor Larry Ingrassia’s build-up of business columnists, from veterans Gretchen Morgenson and Floyd Norris to new(er)bies Andrew Ross Sorkin, Brian Stelter, David Carr, Ron Lieber, and David Pogue. And the Times more recently picked up James Stewart from archrival Dow Jones.

At Fox News, Roger Ailes has cannily built the most successful cable news operation not on the interchangeable blondes that provide so much fodder for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but on O’Reilly and Hannity.

At NBC, the news franchise is so built around Brian Williams that his well-received newsmagazine “Rock Center with Brian Williams” is synonymous with its host.

At Time Warner’s CNN and Time, we see the building of a worldly franchise on Fareed Zakaria’s clear-eyed, no-nonsense view of our times.

And then there’s the more local and regional press. Newspapers have long believed that it wasn’t any one or a half-dozen names that sold the paper. They’ve believed the news itself was the star, and the daily information report was the brand. That may be still be true of the Times, the Journal, the Financial Times, the Guardian, and a handful of other national/global news organizations — all of which have substantial, multi-hundred newsrooms that produce branded, unique products. It’s less true of regional and local dailies, many of which still present too much commoditized news in national, business, entertainment, and sports coverage, and have bid goodbye to many faces familiar to readers. Those that have retained familiar faces must do what they can to keep them; all need to recruiting more.

Then they may have a good answer to the question, in one form or another, consumers and advertisers will increasingly ask: What’s your signature content?

2. Didn’t CNN’s coverage of the Iowa Caucuses illustrate our screens future? John King has been the King of the Screens, and we can remember when his magic-touch screen seemed wildly innovative. Now in the touch-screen era, it was all screens all night — save Wolf Blitzer’s classic utterance of “OMG” in seeing Romney go up by a single vote — and CNN newbie Erin Burnett brought the right slapstick spirit to the uncertain screencraft. She whooshed one image off one screen on to the next one, sometimes successfully. CNN’s use of data, even as limited as it was for this election, showed how much we’ve moved beyond the world of still print infographics. The marriage of analytics and screens from tablets to livingroom monitors is forever changing how we take in information.

3. If AOL crumbles in one direction or another, what’s the future for smart cookie Arianna Huffington, who has parlayed personality and business model into an enviable perch in American journalism? Who might pick up HuffPo, one of the easiest-to-define business lines in journalism? How much will its relatively low rate of ad return (“The Newsonomics of ARPU” deter buyers? With the emergence of a broad international strategy (10 new editions) – “We’re now re-expanding back into a list of countries”, said CEO Tim Armstrong Tuesday – it becomes a more interesting play.

4. With Alibaba hot on the Yahoo tail, how much should we wonder about the future of big aggregators stocking up on a professional journalists? AJR estimated that Yahoo has hired about 200 journalists and AOL 250 (not counting the Patchers). Those hundreds have produced some pretty good journalism, particularly with sports scoops, and have proven that the term “as first reported by Yahoo,” isn’t a joke. The question of Chinese ownership is a knotty one (interesting Fortune take on American hypocrisy, here), but we have to ask questions about how free a journalistic corps would be under Jack Ma leadership. It might be well and good to uncover U.S. football corruption, and that’s a growth sport itself, but what about wider public policy coverage? For AOL journalists, the questions are even gauzier. With AOL’s deepening financial questions and investor pressure to cut back on non-profit-producing business lines, how long will there jobs be maintained, under current or potential new management/ownership?

5. Won’t be 2012 be the age of All-Access perfecting? Time Inc is among those getting its tablet act together well, with Time Magazine a fairly slick tablet app. In December, the company made a foray at convincing print subscribers that connecting the print sub with digital access is a good idea. The sign-on process is fairly straightforward, and seems to hold session to session, unlike some others. Yet, subscribing to more than one Time Inc. product — Time Magazine and Sunset, for instance — has to be done twice. Expect that kind of obstacle to be eliminated going forward. All-Access will be real all access, made easier for consumers. And All-Access is even trickling down very local as the Monterey (Ca.) County Weekly heralds its all-access availability through public radio sponsorship. Getting All-Access right — pricing, real tablet- and smartphone-appropriate apps, customer ease, giving subscribers cross-title benefits — is one of the biggest tasks for news and magazine publishers this year.

6. How could a single person be empowered to send a message on behalf of the New York Times to eight million people? The Times’ your subscription-is-ending embarrassment email showed the company at its worst in detecting and handling a crisis. My larger question is how, in any scenario, a single person has the unchecked power to send a message to eight million people on behalf of a big brand? The culture of checking and doublechecking (yes, the sorry Judith Miller tragedy aside) is so deeply ingrained in Times’ DNA. Why isn’t it part of the wider culture, especially in the one-click age?

7. What’s more local than language? The Times profiled Wordnik Sunday. It’s an innovative modern language company making the most of digital technology to surface new and real meaning of our living language in this fast-changing age. Noted in the story is that the Times and News Corp’s Smart Money are using Wordnik for glossaries? As local media look for ways to really be more local, knowing and presenting more about place is essential. So what about using something like Wordnik to create local language guides? It’s a small idea, perhaps, but one showing how even local media need to make more use of digital tools if they are to make future claims of relevance to local audiences.

8.Hasn’t Gail Collins turned out to be a just-right-for-the-times replacement for Frank Rich? Rich’s rich prose and panoramic view often left us breathless in its sweep, and well deserved a Pulitzer. Yet Collins — a New Yorker who recently pointed out that “John McCain came in fourth in 2008, with the support of 15,500 Iowans. This is approximately the number of people who live on my block” – has brought a Hee-Haw sensibility perfectly suited to the Wonderlandia of the Republican primary scene.

9. With a call-out to Ken Kesey, isn’t 2012 the year when you’re either on the cloud … of off it?

There’s an algorithm out there, we can be sure. It’s got all the components of business success for news-creating companies, each value carefully computed and relational to the others. Yet, approaching 2012, the algorithm hasn’t been found. We have but shreds of numbers, beacons of numerals that portend models, but can’t prove them out.

2011 has been a remarkable year. We can point to three major phenomena that profoundly changed the news landscape this year. Each offers up its own half-formed metrics for that magic formula in process, and each has dramatically changed the possibilities of news, each largely positive:

• The transcendant transformative age of the tablet: The first real replacement device for print swept aside doubters, netbooks, and much conventional wisdom before its second birthday. More than one in 10 American adults owns one, with that number likely to more than double in the next two years. Those owners are readers, spending lots of time with news, single brands, and longer stories.  (“The Newsonomics of the Missing Link“)
• The dawn of digital circulation: Forget “paid content.” Forget “paywalls.” It’s the back-to-the future age of circulation: paying for news and magazines that we depend on, no matter how they are delivered to us. All-Access reinforces our relationship with news and magazine brands we like; ubiquitous access (print, online, tablet, smartphone, soon connected TV) allows us to justify paying for convenience as much as the content itself. Publishers are still experimenting with how to get the paid proposition right, but those that do now have a potent second digital revenue source — and that’s a business advantage digital-only competitors lack.
• Social curation joins editorial curation: We knew that Facebook, in particular, and “social” more generally — including Twitter, LinkedIn, most-emailed lists and our own individual sharings — were changing how we all decided what to read. Now, though, social curation is being built into the best publishing models. Why should each of our own personal quests be a virgin start-from-scratch idea when many consumers/searchers/researchers/shoppers (some of them people like us) have tread there before? So social intelligence, gleaned from mountains of data, is becoming a required part of the companies’ product development and consumer experience. Facebook is in the catbird’s seat as that world develops.

Those three game-changing phenomena offer major drivers of change — but not models. For publishers, the near-term is just getting harder and harder; witness Media General’s major cuts of this week in Tampa (16 percent workforce reduction) and elsewhere. Major cuts are happening this month and into January, as publishers gird for another 5-12 percent decline in ad revenues. Continuing profitability can only be achieved by cutting.

Publishers, publicly or not, are embracing the Digital First mantra of John Paton and Clark Gilbert, the industry’s dynamic duo, who put on another show at BIA/Kelsey this week. Everyone’s into the deconstruction/reconstruction of their companies; some are faster, more adroit, and more public about it.

As that reconstruction moves forward, the new magic formula may seem simple: reconfigure costs and revenues. Yet, working the in-between — most publishers still depend on print for 80 percent of their revenues — is hardly formulaic. Building the new cost structure and the new revenue structure, in tandem, with changing audiences and advertising spending habits, is the fixing-the-moving-car-at-65 MPH scenario publishers face.

With that speeding car in mind, let’s look at some of the numbers that will go into that magic formula, when it’s finally perfected. Mix, match, blend, and extrapolate:

5-15 percent: That’s the percentage of many news sites monthly unique visitors that drive half or more of their pageviews. That’s a jaw-dropping number, and one that news companies are just beginning to acknowledge — privately. Why be quiet about it? Look at the annual reports and quarterly financial disclosures of the public companies; they trumpet uniques and pageviews. Yet in the age of news ubiquity, we’ve reached near-infinity in pageviews and of ad inventory. Is there much meaning left to one random web visitor hitting one random web page, courtesy of Google or Facebook, some time in any given month? Not much. Yet, that’s what most people still point to publicly. Privately, the question is the 5-15 percent. These are your customers. How much will they pay for access? How much more valuable are they to targeting advertisers, given you know much more about their reading and shopping habits? The metric needed: How much does a core customer yield annually, and in a lifetime? Then: How do I most efficiently find and convert more of them?

35 percent: That’s the percentage of print readers who will transition to tablet-only by 2014, believes one prominent news company, which is using that forecast in its business planning. High? Low? What’s your number?

$544 a year: That’s a Newspaper Association of America number (from 2009) for the revenue value per unit of Sunday circulation. What will a tablet customer be worth, combining subscriber and ad value? Get that answer right and you can try to accelerate, or slow down, your readers’ embrace of the tablet.

10-20 percent: That’s how much of national news company traffic now comes from mobile; Facebook already says that 35 percent of its use comes from mobile. Yet, in the U.S., only three percent of digital revenue comes from mobile. That’s a huge gap — the audience is way ahead of the money — and it will be closed over the next several years. In fact, in the age of expected anywhere access, “mobile” will disappear as a category. Big issues for publishers: dividing what kinds of revenues can be wrung from tablet (now lumped into “mobile”) and from the brain extensions in our pockets and pocketbooks, the smartphone.

One billion: That’s one estimate of how many smartphones will be shipped worldwide in 2016. It’s a continuing curve upward from the almost half-billion shipped this year. U.S. smartphone penetration is about a third of cellphone owners; so there is lots of headroom for growth. (Singapore’s the first to cross the 50 percent threshold.) Big challenge for news and magazine companies: coming to terms with how to make money on that little screen: advertising, sponsorship, All-Access subs, and more.

63 million: That’s the number of smart TVs that will be shipped in 2011, up from 43.6 million in 2010. 2016 forecast: 153 million. Smart TV is just the next screen, joining the tablet and the smartphone, providing us ubiquity. When WSJ Live (“The Newsonomics of WSJ Live“) — the company’s model-breaking tablet product launched this fall — it included launch partners Samsung and Vizio, leading smart TV makers. This is the beginning of the next wave.

$2.75: That’s the average ad CPM, or cost-per-thousand rate gotten, at one top 15 news sites. Average rates have been going down and are likely to continue doing so. High-targeted and high-branded (combine the two, and you’ve got the best of both worlds) audiences continue to outpace average sites and average inventory. It’s less and less good to be average.

22 percent: That’s the third-quarter increase in U.S. digital ad revenue. Digital ad growth accelerates as print declines more rapidly; in the U.S., it is now surpassing newspapers to become second only to TV. Worldwide, expect the industry to hit $80 billion this year. Within that ad spend, publishers have access to less than half: Paid search continues to be about half the market, with publishers getting only a tiny slice of it. Display/banner ads — publishers’ strongest suit — account for 23 percent of the total. Video is growing 42 percent a year. Performance-based business models (as opposed to selling impressions) now command 64 percent of the market. (Most data from IAB.) So, in all the areas of growth, news and magazine publishers are weakest. Despite uneven digital ad results reported by newspaper and magazine companies, it’s not that the money isn’t there — they just haven’t transitioned their businesses enough to compete for it.

$13 billion: That’s the amount of retail ad revenue the newspaper industry in the U.S. took in for all of 2010, and it’s down this year. Retail makes up roughly half of all newspaper companies’ ad revenue. In a new, circle-the-wagons attempt to hold on to it, ShopCo, a consortium of eight of the large newspaper companies, is building out a new local shopping portal. FindnSave, tested first by McClatchy, should be up in 250 larger markets by the middle of next year. Will it be good enough and big enough, to satisfy both consumers and merchants? (“The Newsonomics of Google’s retail push“)

25 percent: So if a reader drops print and embraces the tablet, and digital access overall, how much savings can a news company achieve? It no longer has to print and deliver a paper, but it still has the costs of maintaining a staff, maintaining distribution, and maintaining a plant. So maybe it costs 25 percent less to fulfill that customer’s access? In this long interim with hybrid digital and print reading, how much of their production costs can companies cut out? The long-term question: At what point can the news industry make a major shift, as most reading becomes digital and a minority of it in print?

56.7 percent: That’s the percentage of downloaders of the Guardian’s new Facebook app who are under 24, with 16.7 percent 17 or younger. For a news industry decrying the lack of young readers and focused on aging baby boomers as the core audience, the Guardian’s early experience is phenomenal. It’s well and good to sell All-Access to long-time print readers; it’s essential to bring in new ones, and Facebook looks like a great bet.

7: Daily means seven days a week for newspapers, right? MediaNews is dropping Monday printing at some Northern California papers. Michigan remains the epicenter of the non-daily daily. Following the 2009 cuts in metro Detroit, Advance is now going digital-first with smaller papers there, with several becoming three- and four-day print “dailies.” The idea: keep 85 percent of print ad money and radically reduce print costs. Publishers take a very deep breath and hope they aren’t cutting the print cord too soon. Expect to see more of such day cuts in 2012 and beyond. It’s a hybrid strategy, and as we see its impacts — on print ad revenue and on digital reader and ad transition — we’ll have new numbers to plug into the model.

> 1 percent: Google now makes 54 percent of its revenue outside the U.S., as does Apple. Such international orientation is a major differentiator in the economy of the day, and not in the publishing and digital industries. Even The New York Times, with impressive global reach, gets only a percent or two of its revenue internationally. In the last year, we’ve seen The Independent (through Press+) selling U.S. access, PBS launching a British channel, and the Guardian relaunching an American foray. Digital media knows no national bounds, but monetizing outside home countries has been difficult. Breaking through this barrier could create significant upside for top publishers.

Membership ain’t what it used to be.

Two years ago, I signed up for Amazon’s Prime program. $79 a year for unlimited two-day shipping. It was a tailor-made program for someone like me who bought everything from printer paper to lawnmowers online. (Really — a nifty all-electric model, delivered to within three feet of my door, requiring just two bolts to be attached before it was ready to roll.)

Some financial analysts decried the program, limiting themselves, as they often do, to the math. And the math said Prime could be a losing proposition, with customers costing Amazon more in shipping costs than the $79 they paid. It was short-sighted. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was, and is, all about building market share.

As a consumer and a media analyst, I understood immediately what Bezos was up to: make it easy for me to buy, save me some money on shipping, deliver my stuff quickly (whether I needed quickly or not) — and I’d buy more stuff from Amazon. It’s worked.

As Amazon expands Prime, and rolls out Kindle Fire, it’s time we looked at the Prime moves as a quasi-subscription product, something news and magazine companies know a lot about it. Let’s take a quick look at the relative newsonomics of what Amazon is up to, and how it compares to the business publishers know well.

For Amazon, giving me “free” shipping for a capped annual price is certainly about volume of sales. Estimates are that Prime members — about 10 million in total — up about 40 percent of Amazon’s U.S. sales, each member buying around $1,500 worth of stuff a year.

These are core customers, the same sort of core customers that is driving digital subscription sales for newspapers and magazines. We were either already core when we saw the Prime offer or became core because of it. Simply, Prime is all about relationship. In fact, “free two-day shipping” turned out to be — was it Bezos’ plan from the beginning, or a happy stumble? — a backdoor to relationship building.

Bezos took a retail business without much loyalty and is turning it into a loyalty business.

Then, in February, Amazon extended Prime benefits to free instant streaming of videos, as its on-demand service (13,000 movies so far) got off the ground. Then, two weeks ago, it announced a “free” book lending service (5,000 books so far) for Prime members. These are just fledgling steps in turning Prime customers into media-swilling Amazon members. It’s an old-fashioned, co-op-like membership meme, offered from one of the world’s great progenitors of digital age capitalism. (Here’s a good Prime primer by Brad Tuttle at Time’s Moneyland, and here’s a good rundown on the business end from the Journal’s Stu Woo.)

Consider these numbers offered up by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster in the Journal story:

• Amazon currently incurs about $90 a year in cost for each Prime customer, losing $11 annually per subscriber, off its $79 single price point. (The more you buy, the more you save!)
• Of the $90, $55 is due to shipping costs and $35 is driven by acquiring digital video content. Now, related book-lending services costs will be added, driving up the loss for this leader.

So investors were a tad concerned recently when this trajectory of cost reduced Amazon’s overall operating margin shrank to 0.7 percent in the third quarter from 3.5 percent a year earlier.

Munster smartly juxtaposes the increased loyalty and sales volume against that loss — or against that investment.

Now let’s turn the news and magazine industry, and ask a few questions:

• What’s the difference between a shipping fee and a subscription? They seem quite different historically, but Amazon is building a bridge between the two.
• What’s the difference between a buyer and a reader? Shopping and reading always coexisted in newspapers and magazines; Amazon just offers a new twist here, starting with buying and then moving to reading.
• What’s the difference between a newspaper subscription and a membership that gets you “free” media? Amazon pushes us back into the mindset that soft goods — digital books, digital music, digital movies — are worth less than hard stuff that it ships us, the office supplies and lawnmowers. That’s a bit depressing. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world in which the soft stuff that provides enjoyment, entertainment and learning were more the real value, and garden and office tools the freebies?

In the world as it is, though, news and entertainment media are countering with the All-Access value model. Take all our content — and be excited about all the ways we now bring it to you. Netflix, Comcast, HBO, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal are selling convenience, immediate gratification, and mobility — all great if often short-sighted American virtues. “Sell the sizzle, not the steak” is as good a Mad Men tenet of faith as any.

“Smart is the new sexy,” the Newspaper Association of America’s most recent effort to reassert the value of news media, probably misses the sizzle we’re seeing offered by others. Everyone knows it’s easier to buy a smart pair of eyeglasses to achieve the sexy look than read a paper (or site) every day.

A few more things for news and magazine media to think about here:

• Newspapers have been rightly concerned about losing a direct customer relationship as digital subscribers become Apple or Amazon customers rather their own. The Prime move sheds new light on this question: If the world’s premier online seller becomes a media hub, the question of who owns the customer gets even bigger. It’s a growing Goliath vs. a shrinking David here; Amazon just will continue to add more and more media (and other goods and services) to its Prime membership base.
• Amazon’s 10 million Prime members compares well against individual media. Among U.S. newspapers, the Wall Street Journal leads with about million sales. AARP puts its magazine number at 22 million — a number boosted by a model framed around membership — while Meredith’s Better Home and Gardens comes in at 7 million. Maybe more apt “media” comparisons may be Netflix at 22 million or ATT Wireless’ more than 100 million. The key questions here: What is membership, what is subscription and what is media?
• This is about much more than a $79 offer; it’s about deep and building customer knowledge. Amazon’s “Recommendations” have long been talked about, but its mastery of customer analytics is the big story here. That’s what any competitor to Amazon must contend with. It’s noteworthy that companies as small as The Day in Connecticut  (“The Newsonomics of 100% Reach“) and as global as the Financial Times (“The Newsonomics of the FT as an Internet Retailer“) ) are taking similar analytics-driven approaches to their businesses. If you are in the media business and behind on the analytics curve, Prime is a new caution in how your franchise could crumble in the age of Big, Actionable Data.
• So what are news and magazine companies’ propositions here? Is All-Access to the news or magazine titles just a foundation? If Amazon, a former hard book seller, can reinvent itself as a media company, which media might become wider media centers, essentially re-selling the movies, music and books streamed by others (including Amazon)? If this is about customer relationship, it’s probably either an upward or downward spiral. Keep the customers you have by offering them more, or risk losing those primary relationships to others (Kindle Newsstand, Apple Newsstand, plus, plus, plus). That’s a sobering, but likely, scenario.