Latitude

Contributing editors: Jessica Reinis, Ian Schulte.

This is part 2 of The Opportunity Space on digital content. Part 1 focused on e-readers.

Latitude has done extensive work in the media space. We believe in transposing the wisdom and, whenever possible, the applied frameworks from one content platform onto another in order to create novel solutions.

Based on recent studies focusing on interaction across several digital content experiences (Web, music, etc.), we offer the following three suggestions for Web-based digital content–and, more generally, for all digital media experiences.

First, once you’ve gone free: stay free. If you’d like to charge for access, you should be offering new features or content.

1. Intelligent Personalization

   Personal accounts help to customize experiences (and create site stickiness). For high-volume content providers, it would be useful to have dynamically updated, personalized “Fever” recommendations based on one’s interactions with the site in total, rather than singly informed “related post” suggestions.

   Contour to the user, not the content.

   The ability to “favorite,” save, and organize articles for future perusal would also be valuable (Agglom‘s model is a start). Or, borrowing a page (so to speak) from e-reader technology, what if you could highlight and annotate bookmarked digital Web content from a particular provider?

2. Crowd-Contingent Pricing

   Crowd-contingent pricing works especially well with pay-per-piece items (like premium content). In the case of digital Web content–short reports like executive summaries, or exclusive/high-quality content with low production costs and wide appeal.

   The music industry has been innovating new monetization models for some time. Amie Street (which recently partnered with Sony) is an mp3 retailer with a dynamic pricing model; song prices rise according to their popularity, capping out at 98 cents.

   Crowd-contingent dynamic pricing appeals because it:

   • rewards the earliest purchasers (often the most loyal users)
   • provides a sense of transparency to users about the pricing
   • incentivizes purchases by attesting to the quality of the content–it ties price directly to popularity.

3. Tiered Pricing: Customizing Access & Experience

   Based on recent studies with music access, Latitude found that more than half of both free (streaming, sharing, etc.) and paid music listeners deemed access from multiple devices to be a pay-worthy feature.

In a similar vein, you may have heard the WSJ’s report that Apple recently acquired Lala.com, which “lets users pay 10 cents [per song] for permanent access to [a streamable Web browser version that] cannot be downloaded to a user’s computer hard drive or to portable players.”

(Pssst. Grooveshark does the same thing for free–but users pay for premium mobile access, predictably.)

What’s worth paying for has much to do with the experience, which–today–has much to do with access, immediacy, and convenience. (I wouldn’t pay to own it, but I might pay for access to it right now.)

Because digital Web content has always been “free” (for the most part), pricing customization is especially important, alongside the quality of experience. One can pay only for what he needs and, moreover, enjoy the autonomy of customization.

Consider a shopping-cart style pricing model for digital Web content experiences:

Header image courtesy of edan’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.