One of the biggest questions in news media is the whether to charge for online content, or more exactly, how to make revenue for providing online content. The obvious way is through advertising, Google Adwords being the most established .

The choices are offer the content for free and sell advertising space or place the content behind a ‘paywall‘ and charge the viewer a subscription.

The third model, and probably most likely to become most successful, is ‘freemium’.

                      Free + Premium = ‘Freemium’

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has introduced a ‘paywall’ for one of it’s smaller publications, Standard Times, published in Massachusetts. The subsribers can access a certain amount for free, thereafter they have to pay, by subsription. Perhaps he’s testing out how suitable the model is for a publication with a low readership.

When the Irish Times first published content online, it used subscription model, before deciding to allow viewers the content for free. Online advertising is used to bring in revenue.

And now, the New York Times has announced it is to charge for content from 2011. It is to allow free access to a certain number of articles and charging for more content.

But which model works best?

‘Freemium’ certainly appears to be the model that’s getting most traction. Yet another new web world word for the dictionary, freemium describes the the business model which allows a certain amount of content to viewers for free, with advertising, and then offers a premium service, with no advertising ‘noise’, that the viewer has to pay for. The US Sports network ESPN uses this model effectively, also science journals such as Nature and Science. 

It’s a model that works across the web, and is used by social networking site LinkedIn.

The model allows you to offer content, and gain access, to large amounts of viewers for free, with advertising. And for higher-end viewers, there is extra for them, without the intrusion of adverts.

One of the obstacles to paying for news content is the means of payment. News is so disposable and digested in small chunks that viewers do not want to enter into a payment scenario to read a couple of pages, or articles. According to The Guardian, the answer may lie with Apple’s  iTunes. iTunes already has over 100 million accounts with credit card details, and has sold over 8.5 billion songs to date . In the process, it has transformed itself from a music player to an online wallet. Perhaps selling news content, or at least magazines, via a store will be the way forward…

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