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By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

With data collection for the 2012 iteration of the FreePint Survey: News Needs and Preferences well underway, trends regarding corporate use of free and fee resources demonstrate unresolved tension for information professionals. Respondents to date indicate their strong and growing appreciation for premium features like reporting and targeted searching; at the same time, they remain convinced that usage of free resources will grow in the coming year. Read more and participate in the survey.

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Changes in the business environment are what opportunity and risk management are all about. So it's little wonder that survey respondents for the FreePint Survey: News Needs and Preferences are consistently in agreement that "news is an important element of our content portfolio."

But that's as far as the easy answers go. Survey respondents — information managers with budgetary control for content products and services — demonstrate ongoing tension between appreciation for the features and benefits of premium services and the ease and user-familiarity with free offerings.

Figure 1 shows how respondents' perspectives have changed — or not — since we started asking them for agreement ratings on a series of statements in 2009. For each statement, respondents can rate their agreement from 1=completely disagree to 4=completely agree.

The statements include:

• Our use of free resources for news has increased in the past 12 months.
• I expect our use of free resources for news to increase in the next 12 months.
• Free news content fulfills most of the needs of my organisation.
• Premium services offer search, targeting and analytics that free offerings can't match.
• My organisation is willing to accept advertising in exchange for lower costs on news content.
• My organisation is willing to accept limitations in coverage in exchange for lower costs on news content.
• My organisation is willing to accept fewer features in exchange for lower costs on news content.

Fig 1:

Respondent appreciation for the value of premium services' ability to target searches and provide analytics has gone from high to even higher since 2009. At the same time, they remain remarkably consistent in their expectation that use of free resources will increase within their organisations over the next 12 months.

In rating their agreement with statements about their willingness to accept tradeoffs for lower prices on premium services, respondents give highest ratings to the option of reduced feature sets (NB: this statement was not provided as an option in 2009). This result aligns with comments I hear regularly in discussions with information managers: "We just want the content; stop trying to give us a bunch of extra features."

But what a conundrum for providers of premium news services! Their customers indicate that they expect use of free content to increase... and they recognise the value of premium features... and they want publishers to stop investing in "extra features" in exchange for dropping costs.

This combination of factors creates tension in the marketplace that will be very difficult for buyers and sellers to reconcile.

What Is "Free"?

Whilst content buyers try to understand, manage and direct user behaviour along the continuum of free and fee sources, publishers continue to struggle with sustainable business models to supply valuable news content.

Figure 2 shows what survey respondents report regarding the importance of different forms of news content without direct costs to the users. Each bar represents average ratings on a scale of 1=not important to 4=very important.

Fig 2:

Web-based versions of print products continue to be the highest-valued type of non-cost news content within buying organisations. Yet this type of content is at risk if the print products supporting it are not financially viable to their publishers.

In the data collected to date for the 2012 survey, the importance of professional blogs has dipped slightly. However, content aggregators increasingly integrate this type of content (along with social media and newsletters) into their premium databases. So where does this content truly fit on the continuum of free to fee? Difficult to say...

Participate and Benefit

Since the inception of this project in 2008, our theory has been that news content is the bellwether for other types of content: What happens in the sphere of news will eventually move into other types of content. News was the first type of content in which non-cost resources became a serious consideration; news was also the first type of content to move significantly into the mobile arena.

With 5 years of data (4 covering these questions of free and fee-based content), the project offers unique scope for tracking trends around user needs, buyer requirements and publisher responses.

Please participate: The FreePint Survey: News Needs and Preferences remains open through 12 November. Take 15 minutes now to complete it, and you'll receive a copy of the full report upon publication in November 2012.

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