Honey columns
Done free mentality: subscriptions are hip!
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If Youtube and Twitter are already doubting the success of advertising-financed content on the Internet and relying on subscription models, then that’s good news for the Swiss media industry.
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Swiss media are increasingly relying on payment models.
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A friend from the advertising industry recently groaned: “Somebody should invent a subscription model for advertising.” Ten years ago most offers on the Internet were financed by advertising. Now companies are increasingly trying to sell their content by subscription. The pioneers are the streaming services Spotify and Netflix. But the news media are also successfully betting on it. What bad news is for advertising is good for the media.
In the industry magazine “Horizont”, Axel Wüstmann, CEO of CH Media (publisher of this newspaper), revealed that, thanks to the new online payment strategy, “subscribers have now increased for the first time in many years”. The decline in print can therefore be more than offset by new digital subscriptions. Other media companies that have long since abandoned the free mentality have reached this turning point earlier. The NZZ, for example, had over 200,000 subscriptions for the first time in 2020.
A change is noticeable. The tech giants from Silicon Valley, the inventors of the free network, are doubting their old models. Youtube offers a premium subscription for 15.90 per month in order to be able to use the video platform without advertising. And Twitter is testing an advertising-free payment model for the short message service in Australia and Canada. In short: subscriptions are hip.
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