Lessons on content charging from Fox News

Journalism blogger Steve Outing has a good post up on how content charging – or rather membership schemes – could work, by looking at right wing US TV pundit Bill O’Reilly (who due to Murdoch’s largesse in blasting Fox out on one of the Sky channels, we can watch here too).

O’Reilly – sort of a US equivalent of Littlejohn here in the UK – obviously has several layers of viewers.

There’s the mildly curious like myself who will occasionally watch while channel surfing, there’s the regular Fox News viewers, and then there’s the true believers. The ones who I imagine get fired up while watching and bore friends and colleagues with his quotes afterwards.

Those are the ones Fox is getting to pay. So the usual TV spots are of course free to watch as is most content on the web. But for an extra $49.95 a year – not a huge amount – you get exclusive clips, photo albums of the man himself, your comment emails get pushed to the front of the queue, and a weekly backstage live chat.

It’s an interesting model, though there are of course two issues attached to it.

The number of true believers will in any case be quite small as an overall % of the audience. However, numerically as I imagine millions tune in to watch Bill O’Reilly, this number probably quite high. Secondly it depends on you actually having, and building up, personalities – brands in their own right – who people will pay extras for.

What it does seem to do though is to treat news fans a little like sports fans, by separating out the armchair supporters, to the ones who will make the effort to go out and buy the full team paraphernalia down to coffee cups, bed spreads and so on.