Recently the Associated Press faced a firestorm of criticism for launching advertising in its Twitter feed. Martin Belam, formerly UX lead for the Guardian, weighed in on the difficulties of developing a business model for media.
Try and charge for content and everybody will tell you that a universal paywall can never work. Erect a pay-fence and the internet will laugh at you for deliberately making it porous. Try and obtain profiling data to better target advertising, and you get accused of ‘snooping’ on the user. Stop making an app that is losing money and people will tell you that you are an idiot. Give an app away for free and you’ll generate comment rage that it isn’t across every platform. And that is before people arrive on your ad-supported service encouraging others to install an ad-blocker.
This also serves as a good short-list of current media business models: Paywall, Payfence (porous paywall), Targeted Advertising, Paid Apps, Ad-Supported Apps, Standard Web Advertising.
via Martin Belam