AP & Other Services Charging for 30 Min Lead

The traditional newspaper model seems to be broken - at least that's what we're being told to think.  In reality, I think the media space is simply undergoing a pricing and distribution transformation - one that will be ultimately beneficial to both the firms and the end users.   The Associated Press is one of the first firms to take drastic moves to protect it's intellectual property, and price the value of time.  The AP just announced that it was going to start charging a premium to its users if they wanted to get a 30 minute lead on stories.

Over a decade ago, Bloomberg switched from being a data and analytics tool to one that also incorporate breaking financial news.  To this day, 2 the top 5 functions hit on the Bloomberg terminal have to do with messaging (MSG<GO>) and news (TOP<GO>).  What Bloomberg realized, prior to anyone else in the industry, was that people would be willing to pay for news, and the right to get the news faster than anyone else.  (This was particularly true of the financial industry).   What is no secret, however, is that the bloomberg.com newsite carries the same identical stories to the terminal TOP<GO> function, except with a 20 minute delay.  The difference between free and $2000/month is 20 minutes...

 

The onset of blogging, email and instant messenging networks seems to have impacted the value of data as well - the importance of time has become an incredibly valuabe commodity.  If a blogger is the first to break a piece of news, he's likely to be "dug" the most, and cited in other sources, leading to greater revenue generation for his page.  The problem is, however, that although that one blogger may have paid a subscription to a news service to have access to breaking news the fastest - he may have eaten into that news source's revenue by disseminating the information to others for free.  AP has launched a digital permissions framework to monitor the use of its information by bloggers without citations - a smart move, but a highly controversial one.

Ultimately, I think that the Bloomberg model is what many firms will evolve into - their value will be their ability to capture data and present it efficiently and quickly to people.  People will pay for the right to get the information first, and in an effective delivery tool (the terminal and its analytics).