Will 'Matter' Matter? Startup Proposes New Model For Long-Form Journalism

Journalism

from the media-heavyweights-slug-it-out dept

Over the last couple of weeks, there has been growing buzz about Matter, a startup that is proposing a new business model for long-form science journalism and is raising funds on Kickstarter. Their approach is fairly straightforward: each week, they will produce one piece of ultra-high-quality journalism on a science or tech issue, and sell it for 99 cents on as many platforms as possible. It’s less a paywall around a publication, and more an attempt to commoditize articles as discrete, sellable objects.

Will it work? The big debate has been between Felix Salmon (who likes the idea, and has been quite sanguine on paid content ever since the moderate success of the New York Times paywall) and Stephen Morse (who called Matter a “scam” and its creators “snake oil salesmen”—though he later said those terms were intentional hyperbole). Yesterday, they took to YouTube to hash it out in person:

There are a lot of good points both for and against Matter. For one thing, they’ve already doubled their $50,000 funding goal on Kickstarter, which at least demonstrates that people are willing to part with their money for something like this—but Kickstarter backers aren’t necessarily representative of the broader consumer crowds they will need to court with the actual product. One of Salmon’s key points is that since they are raising funds there, instead of going to venture capitalists, their business goals are less daunting: they just need to build something sustainable, not something that will make millions of dollars. The creators have said they don’t plan to pull salaries unless the company is a massive hit. They’ve put a lot of focus on keeping their costs down, so, overall, their financial goals are very different, and a lot more attainable, than the average startup.

On the other hand, as Morse points out, there is plenty of great content out there for free. He doesn’t believe there is truly an untapped demand for this kind of content, so Matter won’t be able to compete. Salmon thinks the Kickstarter numbers say otherwise. Either way, the question is the same: can Matter produce content that is so good and so unique that people will want to pay for it?

I’m reminded of News Corp.’s iPad-only product The Daily, which launched last year to a lot of hype but quickly began losing engagement and talent. People were asking the same question: could The Daily manage to include such great content that people will need to read it in order to stay in the loop? Obviously, it couldn’t.

Matter is more focused than The Daily and is targeting an entirely different audience with a higher standard of journalism, which gives it a leg up in that regard—but I still doubt its potential for one key reason that isn’t getting much attention: the sharing barrier. The problem with putting a price tag on online content is that it actually reduces the appeal of that content, because one of the things people value most about good content is the ability to share and discuss it with their social circle. Exclusivity is a minus, not a plus, with most kinds of content (financial news being an exception, which is why most of the more successful paywalls online are on financial sites). Some people will be willing to pay 99 cents for an article, but a lot of them won’t be willing to ask their friends to pay too by posting a link on Facebook, Twitter or their blog. Those who do are sure to get a lot of confused replies asking “wait, I have to pay?” Moreover, with a pay-per-article model instead of a subscription model, readers are going to have to decide each week if they want to keep paying. The mental transaction cost of 99 cents may be extremely low, but it adds up when you multiply it like that. These factors are going to make it very difficult to grow and retain their readership.

If Matter streamlines their costs enough, and their content is good enough, it’s entirely possible that they can build a small core group of readers that keeps the one-article-a-week model afloat—but if that’s the best possible outcome, is this really the best possible approach? Journalism online needs more than small-scale sustainable models, it needs ways to grow and expand, and that is never going to happen without advertising dollars. As Salmon says, Matter is trying to do “something which has historically been extremely rare, in the world of journalism: selling stories to readers, as opposed to selling readers to advertisers”, and that means they are tackling the wrong problem. They still plan to include some advertising in the articles, but they should be putting a lot more focus on that side of the equation. There are companies out there that want to support this kind of content, and Matter’s low-cost, VC-free model puts them in the perfect position to experiment with innovative sponsorship models—an approach that would be bolstered by opening up the content instead of locking it down, ultimately creating much bigger opportunities to fund quality journalism and turn a profit.

Filed Under: business models, funding, journalism, matter, pricing
Companies: matter