There’s a valuable conversation in the comments on the AOL story just below.
“This is the HBO strategy,” John Robb writes. Hmmm. To me, the HBO strategy is a matter of putting must-have shows (“content”) like “The Sopranos” in a “you can’t get it anywhere else” basket. If you want your “Sopranos,” you have no choice but to become an HBO subscriber, or wait for the DVDs (or borrow a friend’s tapes — which points to the way file-sharing and P2P ultimately undermine the HBO model, but that’s another argument). And I guess I don’t see where AOL has, or has announced plans to have, that sort of must-have content. Locking Time Warner magazines away from the Web and into proprietary AOL spaces isn’t really the same, since if you want your Entertainment Weekly all you have to do is buy it at the newsstand or subscribe. Maybe that benefits AOL Time Warner as a whole (since one way or another you’re spending some money on their content), but it hardly seems to make AOL a “must have” service.
In posting my comment I knew people would bring up Salon’s own for-pay services, and I wasn’t disappointed. “Why would anyone pay *anything* for any content on the web?,” Todd asks. We have roughly 45,000 people paying for Salon Premium now, and while that isn’t the kind of number that will mean anything in an AOL-scaled universe, we think it’s pretty successful for Salon, and it’s certainly been a key part of helping keep us afloat in the rough waters of the last two years. I’m sure each Salon subscriber has a slightly different answer to Todd’s question, but I think many of them are variations on a simple theme: Readers value whatever we do here at Salon that is unique and independent.
The better we fulfill that role — and there are days we do it better and days we don’t — the better we’re serving our subscribers. So as a business, it seems to me, we’re in a fundamentally different universe — in scale and in appeal — from AOL. As a giant media conglomerate , AOL can’t possibly sell itself as “independent”; and it is now very publicly struggling to figure out what it can offer in the way of “unique.”
That’s why I think Pat Powers’ generally astute comment — “Salon and AOL are attempting to make this work with large staffs and expenses, but then, you both have a lot of content. The question is, how compelling is your content?” — asks the right question but works from the wrong data. Salon’s sixty-or-so employees may be “large” compared to the one-person business Pat refers to, but we’re minuscule compared to AOL. And purely by quantity, we have very little content compared to AOL; but everything we publish (except for our AP wires and a couple of syndicated columns) is completely unique to us. There’s just no comparison. Pick your simile: it’s like the difference between your corner coffeehouse and Starbucks, or between your independent bookseller and Barnes and Noble, or between…
(As to Doug Wiken’s question about Table Talk: We converted TT to a pay service to save it. We faced a simple choice — shut Table Talk down, since it was a cash drain on the company that brought in no revenue of its own, or turn it into a break-even proposition. We know we changed Table Talk by making it a for-pay service, but at least we saved it from a total shut-down. I don’t expect anyone to be thrilled by that, but I think the last two years of Web-industry armageddon might put it in some context.)
Gavin Becker writes, “It’s time for AOL to adapt and evolve just like the rest of us. ” I think we can agree on that!
PS Dave Winer posts on what a truly bold move on AOL’s part might have sounded like.
And John Robb has a more extensive explanation for what an HBO strategy for AOL could look like.
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