Dominic Young
Writings and more
Category: Uncategorized
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This article was originally published in as part of their series on Better Britain. Reaction uses Axate to charge for some of its articles (this one is free on their site as well as here!) Britain is indisputably great when it comes to creativity. We are over-performers in the fields of music, writing, film production,…
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When it became clear over a decade ago that advertising alone could not sustain the news industry, news publishers increasingly turned to subscriptions. Now we need to look beyond subscriptions to other reader revenue approaches which address the needs of more of the audience and a wider range of publications. In the noughties, I was…
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It is great that the government is going to conduct a review into the travails of the press. They may well find that the issue is simpler than it first appears. The problem the press suffers from, put simply, is that it can’t make enough money. This isn’t, on the whole, because it is less…
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Paywalls are plagued by a paradox for publishers. On one hand, they offer the seductive prospect of secure, recurring revenue from a group of loyal users. On the other hand, they come at the price of reductions in traffic, users and therefore ad revenue. Introducing digital subscriptions is a big step, especially to products which…
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Founder of micropayments platform Axate Dominic Young argues that chasing digital subscriptions could be futile for many publishers You know the story, of course. Poor old Sisyphus, doomed for eternity to push a great boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down as he reached the top. For Sisyphus read 99% of…
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Google’s attention-grabbing announcement that it will spend $1bn over three years on licensing material from news publishers has been greeted by many with enthusiasm ( including Press Gazette). It’s easy to understand why: new sources of revenue for publishers have been thin on the ground for a very long time. Not only that, but Google’s…
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It’s interesting that, just after Google announced that it’s going to start paying publishers, the New York Times said it is pulling out of Apple News. Those two events tell us a lot about the way ahead for journalism. Google’s plans seem vague. So far they said they want to “pay publishers for high-quality content…
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In a recent CJR article, James Ball argued that so-called micropayments simply won’t work for journalism. I don’t disagree with him. Micropayments, as conceptualized traditionally, offer little benefit to readers or to publishers. They allow cherry-picking of the best content. They disaggregate the products into individual articles. They punish, rather than reward, readers who engage…
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More valuable than ever, but less revenue: Coronavirus has shown us that the news industry needs to…
The value of news to its primary audience is highest, but the ability to generate revenue to news publishers is at its lowest. How can we fix this? In times of crisis, people need reliable, informed and accurate journalism. That journalism needs to be accessible to the widest possible audience, both on a national and local…
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Netflix and Spotify have transformed how people watch TV and listen to music, but what about in news? Will a credible news aggregator ever emerge, and if it did what would it solve? Is Apple News or any kind of aggregation capable of solving the news media’s challenges? Dominic Young, industry commentator (and former managing…
Dominic Young 