membership
The revenue sources for digital distribution such as podcasting tend to boil down to a) underwriting (aka sponsorship aka advertising); b) payments through subscription or a la carte access; and c) membership or voluntary listener support. And there’s another category of bundled syndication deals that are more tied to specific deals and business development.
Of these listener support tends to get the shortest shrift, with some dismissing it as a part public radio’s ‘broken model’ that we should move beyond.
On average only 10% of listeners contribute money to public radio stations each year. And we harrass the other 90% for not chipping in.
And it’s true that the numbers ad up faster if you can effectively sell underwriting spots on tons of downloads, or if several hundreds of thousands of people started paying $10/month.
But I wonder about the opportunities for a new take on voluntary support and the kind of messaging and relationship that would be required in the new medium.
It’s one thing to endure seasonal pledge drives, or to feel the steady drumbeat of year-round on-air reminders to contribute. It’s quite another to imagine listeners responding to the atomized audio files reaching them through various syndicated destinations, or played as a one-off in a flash player on some site.
There’s an alignment in pushing for open syndication and free access - it holds true to the spirit of a public media mission, it may help connect with new audiences for existing content, and - not coincidentally - it builds numbers that attract sponsors to pay the bills.
But even if the underwriting revenue does the trick, I think there’s something important to continue and to redefine in the invitation for voluntary support.
So far it’s a missed opportunity in the current NPR-hosted podcast project. There are no appeals that I’m aware of embedded in the audio (some stations do put those messages into their streaming services). Even without solving the stickier trick of what a call to action would be given the variety of providers and brands, a simple variation on the common line about supporting the free service would be worth a try and could help set expectations among early podcast adoptors.
Doug Kaye has given this some thought with his donor program at the nonprofit Conversations Network . I don’t believe donors get any special access to exclusive content or even functionality.
There is some movement afoot about tying access to content to a membership premium: instead of the coffee mug you get the high-bitrate curated podcast, for example.
More questions abound: is a content-related premium just a back door into paid access; how would voluntary contributions spread across the content provider, the presenter, the distributor. Who manages the relationship with contributors?
That last is a biggie, and leads to an interesting and timely conversation for another time about user-centric identity management and “federated” identity - a topic at the Berkman Identity Mashup conference a month or so ago.
John Sutton wrote:
Great topic Jake. If the end-user must pay, it’s not a public service. Period. One of the reasons I strongly dislike the “1-in-10″ number (besides the fact that it is not true) is that is suggests the listeners are “supposed” to pay for public radio. They aren’t. It’s supposed to be voluntary. If you must pay, then it is subscription radio.
I don’t know exactly how this model plays out on-line, but I think our past provides an important insight. We must become personally important to the end-user. The donations won’t come from individual podcasts any more than they currently come from listening to individual newscasts or single episodes of Car Talk. But they will come from accumulated experiences with a public service provider they trust. That might be existing providers such as individual stations or NPR. It might be some new entity.
We would do well to pursue some “federated” identity on-line. We would do well to consolidate the back-room business aspects of this. That’s because the other lesson from our past is that the cost of fundraising at stations is too high. We haven’t realized the economies of scale on the business side that we have on the programming side. We should jump at that opportunity while it still presents itself in the on-line world.
Posted on 31-Jul-06 at 9:04 pm | Permalink
Jonathan Sack wrote:
It’s so true that membership is regarded by many as a “necessary evil” and this makes no sense. The distiguishing characteristics of public radio are that it’s a non-profit (more trustworthy) and accountable to the people (members, listeners) of the local community (more trustworthy).
Not only does membership represent public radio’s mission and symbiosis with the local community, it generates the largest source of net revenue for many stations…
It’s what makes the public radio business model work. If public radio were only to generate revenue from underwriting, it would essentially be commercial radio, dependant on for profit companies. Voluntary membership support is what distinguishes public broadcasting from other media.
And its pretty easy project what would happen if public radio moved to a subscription model — if 1 in 10 supports voluntarily, don’t expect many more to pay for the subscription at a higher price point.
It would cripple underwriting: fewer listeners and the expectations of paid subscribers for a commercial-free zone does not make for a very underwriting-friendly environment.
One needs only to look as far as XM and Syrius to see the subscription model in action. Some day they’ll make a profit, but for the time being they are losing money hand over fist.
Lastly, thanks Jake, for the terrific idea about podcasts as premiums. Our company produces the public broadcasting MemberCard for a great many stations. A podcast reviewing the local museums, restaurants, B&B’s, performances, etc. that it connects members to is the perfect complement.
Posted on 01-Aug-06 at 9:17 am | Permalink
jake wrote:
Thanks for the comments, I’ll respond to a couple points in a new post soon.
- Jake
Posted on 04-Aug-06 at 10:24 am | Permalink
Jake Shapiro » Ooh, it makes me wonder wrote:
[...] Here’s a post in response to John Sutton’s post about the “Stairway to Given”, which in turns was partly inspired by my earlier post. Gotta love this blogging thing. I’ve interspersed some quotes from John’s but recommend reading the whole thing and the comments too. Will listeners use public radio podcasts or streams more than any other source of Internet audio? Will they use them 10, 12, 15 times per week? Will they use them consistently over years, not just weeks or months? Can public radio create in listeners the same level of Reliance on its podcasts and streams as it does on its station broadcasts? [...]
Posted on 05-Sep-06 at 7:04 am | Permalink