Paid for content: A ray of hope for content creators

Back in the day, companies introduced paid for content on the digital platforms ranging from pay to play games to online learning subscription services, accessing videos and text among others.

Although the trend might be famous in countries such as the USA with The Economist and New York Times, it is unpopular in Uganda.

For instance, as soon as you Google, ‘The New York Times’ before fully accessing any article on the website, you are required to pay a subscription fee. The payment can be done weekly or there is free access for those with the NYT App.

Paid content refers to information on the Internet such as text, graphics, video and downloads. It is also usually copyrighted.

The notion of users having to pay to access online content is one that site owners are faced with; a task of getting revenue from the site that has been having free access and hence creating a difficult job ahead of them.

Paid content revolution is here to stay.

Mr Job Bwire, online editor at Monitor Publications Limited (MPL) - Daily Monitor, says that on average, MPL gets 2 million visitors per month.

 Data from MPL indicates that on average, there are over 2million users per month, over 5 million sessions with an average session duration of 00:02:30 and number of sessions is 2.13 per user.

“The same data is presented before advertisers and potential clients to buy space on our online platforms,” Mr Bwire says.  

Mr Pius Enywaru, managing editor, Afritechpost says although the paid content revolution has been there for a while, it is taking a whole new twist. 

From the emergence of Over-the-Top (OTT) video streaming providers; Netflix and Amazon, music streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music to news publications introducing subscriptions and paywalls.

“Back in the day, free content was widely available on the Internet and paid content struggled for the longest time and piracy made everything hard for it (paid content) to flourish,” Mr Enywaru says.  

However, the Internet has evolved and given paid content a ray of hope to make an incredible comeback.

He adds that today, creators invest a lot of work and resources into producing content and they are increasingly realising they cannot keep giving it away for free. 

Viability

But is it viable?

“Yes. Creators are putting in a lot of hours and resources into producing their content and the idea of giving it away for free no longer seems to make business sense.”  

With the paid content revolution, things are poised to be changing for content creators.  

He adds that music sales are making a comeback through subscriptions to streaming services such as Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal, whereas downloads and CD sales are declining. 

“Music streaming services have made it so convenient and cheap for us to discover music and playlists from all over the world at a swipe of a finger.  Netflix has enabled filmmakers to easily earn from their content and Amazon has given writers power over their books,” Mr Enywaru explains.

He further adds that paid content revolution should never be an issue and there is certainly nothing to worry about.

 This he attributes to great content which is increasingly becoming expensive to produce and in due time, it is going to become very hard for some content creators to continue giving it away for free.

 “We still have a long way before we fully embrace the idea of paid content. But we shall get there. The onus is on content creators to create compelling content that will make consumers want to pay for it,” he adds.

Getting it right

Mr Enywaru says content creators need to widen their scope and get the wind of how fast the industry is changing and certainly be part of the change.

Video content has suddenly exploded and is a big deal, podcasts are a thing now; thanks to the emergence of social media platforms that make creation of this content easy and creators are getting smart at it. 

 “They need to accustom themselves with these platforms, diversify their content to suit a wide range of audiences and focus on constantly building an organic audience as well,” he says, adding that if consumers are going to pay for content, it better be worth their money. 

 In addition, content creators need to go out of their way to learn how things work. Musicians should learn how to copyright their content on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Music, creators need to ensure ownership of all the content lest it gets plagiarised or stolen.

“The Paid content revolution pushes creators to invest more time and resources into their work to produce quality material,” he says.