People pay for content with money OR their time*
From a consumer perspective, ‘paying’ for content has to emerge as a problem solver and not another problem to deal with.
Consider the scenarios in which a consumer pays / is willing to pay for content –

• to save money
• to save time
• to save effort: curated bundles of content along interest based verticals (value addition)
• unbundling of complex (and expensive) media packages (like selling ‘singles’ in the music business)
• on the move access
• language services (translation, text to speech)
• budgeted institutional media / content purchase

Consider some of the challenges (at least in the Indian context) –
1.    Lack of a digital (monetisable) identity like credit card etc
2.    Language (local language content is in short supply)
3.    Access (awareness and availability)
As a Creative Individual and a mildly puzzled entrepreneur I find myself asking a few key questions:
a.    Creation – why are we creating what we are? Is there a precedent/gap/trend that we’ve identified? Can we collaborate/use online tools to reduce the cost of production? Do we know the target audience well enough? Can we collaborate with other online destinations (where our audience is) to identify and access the audience?

b.    Distribution – are we optimally using ‘free’ platforms we can leverage to increase discovery and impact of the content? How do we separate the discovery and consumption? Is there a regular social media outpost that we can manage to inform and update our loyal customers? Do we allow them to bring their friends to the party?

c.    Billing – have we passed on the benefits of reduced distribution, advertising and delivery costs to the consumer? Is the content ‘cheaper’ because of it? Is it easy to access? Have we hobbled paid content with rights management softwares? (reducing the effective value of the purchase) Is the content bundled? Can the customer pay for smaller bundles of content? (micro-payment friendly)

TWO SECRET WEAPONS (well, not so secret actually but effective all the same)
1.    Mobile phones – we imagine it as a key element in the ‘paid content’ ecosystem both as a payment gateway and a delivery channel. ‘Text to pay’, ‘pre-pay’ and ‘micro-payment’ are only just being used to pay for content but are simple enough and available in a great scaled environment so as to make it (payment through mobile phones) feasible.

2.    People pay for content with money OR their time* – We have to figure how to monetise the latter.  Advertising still remains the best way to monetise the time users spent consuming your content, the question is how innovative can we be about it. At what point does it become feasible to sell your own advertising deals (which maybe smaller and more painful to service) that allow the advertiser to FULLY UTILISE the scope and audience offered by your business?

SUMMARY: Build platforms, ‘ease’ and ‘simplicity’ score big – bigger than we imagine, collaborate to create industry standards with peers: tying up with even one more company like yours is a ‘collaborative’ effort! And the biggest thing – DON’T BE AFRAID TO CHARGE FOR WHAT YOU CREATE