Monday December 7, 2009 | 11 comments
In a couple weeks, World Tea will launch a new WorldTeaNews.com. It will be like the existing web site in terms of the quality and depth of content, but will differ in a couple significant ways. The most important is that it will include some content you can only access with a paid subscription.
Lots of research and strategic planning went into this decision, but it still wasn’t an easy one to reach. Despite the fact that one beloved print news publication after another closes down due its inability to survive in the current market using the current business model, some readers continue to expect to get journalistic content for free.
The history of this conundrum is by now well-known to most people, but for anyone unfamiliar with it, here’s a highly simplified synopsis: During the rise of the Internet, influenced by the pervasive “everything-is-free” mentality, news publishers began offering most – and in some cases all – their content in both print and digital format, the latter at no cost. Many believed that giving away digital content for free would more than make up for its cost by expanding readership, driving readers to print publications and increasing advertising and sponsorship revenue.
To see just how spectacularly wrong this thinking turned out to be, look at any of the dozens of newspapers and magazines that, in the past few years, have had to stop or alter their publication to survive – from the national Christian Science Monitor, to the local Rocky Mountain News, to our own industry’s Tea Room News. Every week, more are added to the list.
Like their counterparts in the music industry, leaders in publishing continue to struggle to find a long-term solution. (This is partly why we launched last year as digital only.) Some fresh ideas have emerged lately, and there is hope on the horizon.
An oft-cited thorn in the debate has been consumers’ unwillingness to pay for content. As an American, I find this odd. Today’s economic woes notwithstanding, U.S. consumers have certainly proven ready and willing to pay – sometimes outrageously inflated amounts of money relative to value – for every other product they consume.
And yet, my own boyfriend exclaimed in horror a couple weeks ago that his favorite source of streaming music on the Internet, Pandora.com, was going to begin – eek gads! – charging him 99 cents a month for a subscription. This move by Pandora followed another recent change: inserting paid advertisements every 20 or so songs.
Luckily, the mindset my boyfriend reflected appears to be waning. Most people I talk to now realize that musicians, photographers, writers, and other skilled professional content creators are human beings who have the same living requirements as the rest of us (i.e., food and shelter) and that these things cost money. In other words, they can’t work for free simply because their work involves creating a product you would prefer not to pay for.
Even better for me, as the editor of a trade news publication, recent research indicates that the more necessary a consumer perceives a product to be, the more money he or she is willing to pay for it. Because business publications help people do their jobs better, they tend to fall into this must-have category. This explains the continued success of the Wall Street Journal, despite the fact it adopted a paid content strategy early on, when others were still stuck in the “everything-is-free” mentality. (Subscribers to the last trade magazine I worked for pay $500 a year for print and online content.)
The fact is that no matter how idealistic and devoted journalists are, most are part of a for-profit business. Just like our counterparts in print, who all charge subscriptions, World Tea News provides independently reported, researched, and fact-checked journalism – the type of content that can only be created by skilled 
professional writers and editors. It would be extremely difficult to generate content of this caliber for free, and we don’t. So, why would we give it away for free? That would be like a tea room owner paying top dollar for his tea, and then serving it to his customers at no cost.
We hope that you understand and agree with this logic as we move to a paid content business model. Knowing that the specialty tea industry is built on the hard work of small-business owners, who are also struggling in this economy, we have kept the cost of a full subscription low ($5 per month will allow full access to everything on our web site), and we will continue to deliver our weekly e-newsletter summarizing the week’s stories for free. We’re also going to reinvest profits we make through this transition into even better, more useful content for our subscribers, such as industry research.
As a member of the industry, World Tea News believes we’re all in this together. By continuing to support us, you vote for the continued availability of independent news and information from the only source that focuses exclusively on the specialty tea trade. You need us, and in order to stick around, we need you too.
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I consider myself a big proponent of World Tea News and a close friend of those behind the enterprise. I also am extremely desirous of a healthy and growing Tea Industry. Any organization promoting professionalism and education among the tea business community is a value to our industry.
I will be interested to see how this plays out. There is a great deal of competition among the providers of free content relating to tea. If we’re to be honest with ourselves, there is also a great deal of poor quality free content out there.
In my opinion, if charging for content allows the World Tea News to do more by way of compiling and creating the most valuable information relating to the tea business tea, then I applaud the move and am anxious to see the improvements. If the move is required to maintain the status quo, then I do question the consumer’s willingness to pay.
This will be an interesting test of our industry and the question of paying for content at its core. I wish you much success!
The internet is the new media, TV, Radio, Newspaper is where it’s at. We’ve become an internet generation.
When I moved to Missouri I found things by, you guessed it, the internet. IF a doctor or business had no website, they did not even see me, they were not even in the running.
Pandora, probably a big mistake, because someone will come out and create a free one and they will eventually shut the doors. Internet money is made from advertisers, not charging people!
I have discovered through T Ching that internet advertising has ceased to be a revenue stream, atleast in this industry. When T Ching began, we were told that once our readership became significant, we could easily find advertisers who would be eager to pay for advertising. We discovered recently that we had achieved the #2 position of the most popular tea blog on the internet. As you can imagine, we’re very excited about our growth and popularity. What we have also learned is that advertising on the internet, at least in the tea industry, is no more. It would appear that Heidi is accurate in her understanding. I must admit to having mixed feelings about it. I feel horrified that print publications are closing their doors and those that are still printing, are struggling to make ends meet. Will we be living in a time when books and magazines no longer exist? I do know however, that writers have a right to be paid for their work and if internet sites can no longer acquire advertising revenue, then they have no choice but to charge a small fee for their content.
Michelle, I would suggest that internet advertising is still a very vibrant revenue stream, but like most advertising, the sheer volume of competition has depressed the effectiveness over time. In the early days of the Internet an advertiser would pay you $0.20 for each customer that SAW an add on your website. Today, an advertiser will pay you $0.20 for each customer that CLICKS an add on your website. A 0.5% click through rate is not uncommon, so an article that gets viewed 1,000 times might get 5 clicks and make you a dollar in revenue. Those numbers work great on a site that gets a million page views on a single article ($1,000 in revenue per article), but while T Ching may be growing into a large duck, the Tea Industry is still a small pond! :)
The challenge for T Ching and for the World Tea news is not only to reach a larger audience, but more importantly, to go deeper and offer greater value to the core base of tea connoisseurs that is paying attention already. Many tea people buy more books than they can read and far more tea than they can drink. They WILL spend money. The trick is generating content that they don’t want to live without.
As a tea blogger and avid reader, I am of two minds. I am happy to pay for necessary things and even some unnecessary ones. Obviously I benefit from being able to blog and have people read me. But I like my books, magazines, newspapers and even my tea catelogues in my hot little hands. But I do a lot of research on line. But if it’s very long, I print it. On the 4th hand….
I have been reading World Tea News for quite some time and have found it a valuable resource. I certainly understand the need to earn revenue and to compensate the work of those putting it together. As a blogger who has been largely doing the work for free, I have been doing more and more freelance work to create a revenue stream. I think WTN has developed a good product and I certainly respect their decision.
All that being said, I do think the fee is higher than I would have hoped for WTN. $60 per year is a significant amount of money for a subscription so I will need a better understanding of what this will provide me as a reader. I look forward to hearing more about WTN’s plans.
Although Heidi has written some good pieces since she has been in at the “World Tea News”, I don’t feel that the content presented in the “World Tea News” rises to the level of news, almost all of which one can come to by setting a few Google alerts, hardly worth the price of the subscription. Because the “World Tea News” is a marketing arm of the World Tea Expo, formally Take Me To Tea, the only tea trade show in the US, it seems unlikely that there could be in unbiased reporting from the WTN. Even though the World Tea Expo is the only game in town, it doesn’t mean that they speak for the the tea industry, any more than does the American Tea Council. WTN does however provide a good central location for reading the press releases issued by tea companies and is a little less self serving than Adagios Tea Trends, and certainly not “independent news and information from the only source that focuses exclusively on the specialty tea trade”. It is really pretty amazing that they should make that claim.
It is true that the tea industry needs good information, and that there is very little be be found either in online or in print. I hate to hear the line, “we are all in this together” because it means that we are all agreeing to a being satisfied with a shocking level of mediocrity and tolerance for a level of deceptive marketing that we know is not accurate, but we wink at it because we are ‘all in it together’. It is true that being in the specialty tea industry is hard from a business stand point, (I even think that term ‘specialty tea’ is misleading to the point of being meaningless) and that we have to work together to establish a market for better quality teas. There is a growing list of very good content development people and companies that are really making an effort to disseminate better information about tea. The thing that makes good information about the industry so difficult to come by is the amount of deception involved in marketing tea that we all enable as a shared passive conspiracy. The truth is that there is a lot of ugly news out there regarding the tea industry that is not being mentioned and I don’t see the World Tea Expo risking its market by talking about it.
That being said, I think that Heidi has done an excellent job as editor there, and I don’t believe that good journalism should be free. Heidi, start your own publication. I’ll subscribe to that. There is certainly a need in our industry.
Good arguments Austin,
I don’t subscribe to all of your opinions but I think there is a lot of truth in what you’ve said and I really appreciate the straight, unapologetic approach.
One question: yes, WTN is owned by the WTE, but I’m curious how you see this as resulting in a bias that would affect accuracy or slant the news? The success of the Expo depends on keeping good relationships with all companies. So in theory it could prompt them to avoid being overly critical, but since the WTN doesn’t publish opinion pieces anyway I’m not sure it matters. They certainly cannot slant toward the interest of any one company or segment of the industry without upsetting others.
So anyway, while “affiliated,” WTN is affiliated with an independent entity. As such, I’m not sure I would agree that we need another independent representative of our industry. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Here is where I think the bias is Charles, I think it lies more in the editorial decisions of the WTN in relationship to the marketing goals of the WTE. I don’t expect to see news about tea workers in Assam dying of common dysentery because they can’t get clean drinking water. What effect would that have on the Tea Board of India, one of the biggest patrons of the WTE. I don’t see many articles about the new tea shoppes that have gone bankrupt presently, since the WTE draws at lot of attendees from the people that think that getting into the tea business have a get probability for succeeding based on the learning experience that have at the expo and the exposure to the business there as exhibitors. The tea business is not an easy road to success because the market is growing, but in fact it is a tough complicated business where people that do a very good job and present good quality products are struggling to survive as you know from experience. If the WTE and the WTN spent some time on these issues, and the problems that face us in the industry, I would feel much more inclined to be more supportive. I regret that I have been so silent for such along time because it was not ‘good marketing’ to anything controversial. The WTE does have an agenda, and as a business person I think that is fine.
I think that your suggestions both to WTN and T-Ching are very sound, but I’m pretty sure that the people that are going to me attracted to content will have to be interesting in a way that the same old recycled information is not, and looks at what is going on behind that curtain rather than what’s in the broshure.
I would agree that “real news” is pretty rare in the tea industry. The audience is small, and as a result the budgets for investigative reporting are minute. For argument’s sake, let’s take your example of an article on the living and working condition in Assam. If any publication were to take the approach of charging per article, how many readers in the US would pay $1 to read an article about growing conditions in Assam? My guess is that you would probably get enough buyers to pay someone to spend the time to write the article, but there is no way you could cover the costs of research. As a result, it’s sort of a self fulfilling prophesy. Regardless of who the author is, the companies that make the news make writing articles that support their interests in the tea industry easy. There would have to be a LOT more readers and a LOT more money to change that reality.
So in short I guess I agree with your vision but am not sure how likely it is that anything will change. I am also somewhat less cynical when assessing the value of the WTE and WTN.
As for the health of the industry, I would suggest your analysis is overly pessimistic. There is no question that there are businesses going under and, in some cases, good business people that are failing. That said, the Tea Industry is HEALTHIER than most other industries in the US. The number of tea shops has more than doubled in the last five years and the total tea sales are growing rapidly. I’ve talked extensively with retailers and wholesalers this year and, my anecdotal evidence suggest that most retailers are down something like 10% this year and yet wholesalers are up 25%+. This suggests a rapidly growing industry.
Over the last 50 years the US has been an incredible market for entrepreneurs. Even so, we’ve all seen the numbers that 2/3 of new businesses fail. It IS true that most tea shops will fail. This is to be expected and does NOT mean that the tea industry is weak or suffering. This is kind of like all those stories about Starbucks suffering when they closed 600 stores. That same year they opened more than 1,500 and had more than 10,000 in the US. Weakness is a matter of perspective. :)
At the end of the day I agree that there is far too much navel gazing in our industry. Far too many people patting each other on the back and supporting bad ideas that have no chance of success simply because they are romantic. I owe T-Ching a new blog post tonight. Maybe this is a good topic. :)
I love the debate Austin. Drop me a line at charles@adagio.com. Constructive criticism is so rare that I try to connect with anyone who has the passion and inclination to offer it.
I want to apologize for my statement that content presented by WTN does rise to the level of news. Some of it does. I think as I mentioned before that Heidi Kyser does an excellent job, and is one of the very few people that write about the industry professionally that really does substantive pieces. She does almost all of the work on the site herself. It would be great to see that more people doing the same. Before oil played such a role in geopolitical issues, it was tea, and it still plays a major role in these areas: workers rights, the environment, truth in advertising, transparent supply chains, sustainable agribusiness, health and wellness, global trade, developing economies, and urbanization. Those are some pretty beefy subjects that are not being reported on in our trade publications for the most part. These are tough issues that affect what is going into our cups of tea, and if we are going to raise the bar in our industry they need to be addressed. As Heidi so rightly points out, this kind of reporting costs money.
Charles, I agree that not too many people are interested in the news that companies make. I think that kind of news is pretty boring myself, unless it is about a company that is involved in addressing some of the issues I was mentioning that affect people’s lives in meaningful ways. Who cares how many shops Starbucks opens or closes. I would sure pay to read about the conditions in Assam, the conditions of the workers that must be at times held at gunpoint, the civil war that has raged for decades with tea at its heart. You have my buck. I can tell you that my customers do their research thanks to Google indexing news articles from around the world, and they care about were their food comes from. Don’t underestimate the number of consumers that are interested in knowing what is going on with what they consume, and just how it got to them. It is true that they aren’t paying for Google but they are using it. Who knows what will happens with the business model for news organizations, but research is a whole lot cheaper for the individual, and the market for meaningful information is growing exponentially. A lot of people do care and if someone does go there and does the story, I’m sure they will be able to find someone to publish it that will pay them for it, and I will pay too, and I’m sure you would too.