Free your content. Don’t just make it free.
(Originally published on April 15, 2020)
Museums, zoos, aquariums and the likes are in a precarious situation. Indefinitely shuttered, they can’t generate revenue: no income from tickets, restaurants, concessions, nor event rentals. American museums alone are losing an estimated $33 million a day. Complicating matters, the sector’s fundraising eggs are in one basket. Now that the annual spring galas are cancelled – some which raise between 20 and 40 percent of budgets – museums may have a hard time covering operating costs. ArtNet News reports the Metropolitan Museum of Art may lose $100 million if it stays closed until July; its $3 billion endowment may cushion the blow, but what about other less-fortunate museums? The American Alliance of Museums says as many as 30 percent of American cultural institutions could close permanently without some kind of “Marshall Plan.” Even after health fears subside, the expectation is that people will continue feeling uncomfortable in crowded places; the Met anticipates lower levels of visitation for at least a year.
The result is, says Tim Griffin, the director and chief curator of the Kitchen in New York, every institution is now “going to be entering a period of invention.”
Adjusting to our brave new world
In this cloistered world, where the prospect of travel and the idea of safely congregating in public spaces will not likely resurface any time soon, museums need to alter their model: worry less about how to get people back through their doors, traipsing though their exhibits and buying souvenirs from their gift shops; less about how to put on the next killer exhibition that will magically make it all better.
They need to retool. To remain profitable during the Second World War, many businesses changed their focus. Inglis shifted from producing washing machines to machine guns; instead of manufacturing civilian cars, GM and Ford turned out military vehicles; CPR’s locomotive shop built tanks. To battle COVID-19, many organizations are again retooling: hockey equipment manufacturer Bauer is producing plastic face shields for nurses and doctors instead of defensemen; others are reinventing themselves to make N-95 grade face masks; distillers are producing hand sanitizer. They are doing this to help out – but also to survive.
Cultural organizations are long-overdue for transcending their out-dated business model where success is measured by visits. The usual social media and digitizing strategies barely scratches the surface; the most robust virtual tour of your facility, while nice, will not be sufficient to make a difference. Reimagining how you communicate and educate online should include consideration of how to monetize content: The Athletic has a model that could save museums.
What happened to content?
The challenge for every publisher (any producer of any type of information and content) is how to stand out when people turn on their phones. It’s not just that everyone is competing for attention in a world Cory Doctorow calls a “wilderness of voices,” where there is too much to watch, read, and experience. It’s more that. The Internet changed how we read and especially how we source that content. By embracing the “content should be free” concept, quality has suffered. Giving away the online product means publishers have to make money from Internet advertising: in turn that means the content they create has to attract the greatest number of views per piece. Deeper content – content that is more demanding to write and cost more to produce – earns no more money than shallow articles. Consequently, free means less depth, and pithy and insignificant content proliferates, thereby lowering expectations and eroding decades of hard won brand equity.
By following this trend publishers unwittingly destroyed the relationship readers had with their brands. Can we put the genie back in the bottle? The big question is how to make money from content when people have come to expect “free” – an expectation, Anja Lambrecht writes in Forbes, which has become so deeply engrained that it is difficult for companies trying to monetize their online content. It can be done.
Depth is What People Want
In 2015 a pair of entrepreneurs, Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, both of whom were frustrated with the decline of sports journalism, came up with a simple idea: hire writers to tell great sports stories and convince fans to pay a small subscription. Every person Mather and Hansmann talked to told them it “was the dumbest idea ever” because, even if the articles were great, nobody would be willing to pay for written content: the venture wouldn’t make money.
The idea of being committed to publishing the best storytelling about sports, promising to stay deeply connected to its audience, and asking people to pay for this package seemed revolutionary – this was, after all, an industry that had been telling sports writers for years that their work was worthless. Mathers and Hansmann persisted, however, and The Athletic launched in January 2016 as an ad-free, subscription-based sports writing website providing coverage across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Its “Netflix of sport” model now has more than 600,000 subscribers and has proved a writer’s work does have value.
Modern sports fans don’t want pithy content from a rickety content mill; they’ve followed games on Twitter and already know what happened. The Athletic’s data shows readers want ideas and analysis they can’t get elsewhere, so writers go to great lengths to produce the feature-length stories that readers can’t find at rival publications – much like the old Sports Illustrated once did. Producing better quality content that deepens relationships, which readers will pay for, makes The Athletic both a disrupter and a nod to the past, says Ben Strauss in The Washington Post: reporters churning out old-school coverage buttressed by analysis makes it feel like magazine and newspaper writing from a healthier era (“Sportswriting’s future may depend on The Athletic, which is either reassuring or terrifying.” March 5, 2020).
At the best of times, standing out is hard because you’re competing against advertising and marketing from everybody, not just the organizations in your own narrow niche. Our current situation complicates that further. What does museum reinvention mean in this time of pandemic?
Retooling offers the promise of finding more meaningful ways to persuade the public about your museum’s promise and social value. Curators and educators – some of the ones likely to have been laid off – aren’t working to develop exhibitions but their writing has untapped value. Rethink the notion of “free.” Rethink creating deep, quality content. Rethink the relationship you have with your community; don’t underestimate the value you bring to the table. Build the mechanisms allowing you to communicate deep, meaningful information. Build your own The Athletic. People will pay for it.
Next up in our series about how cultural institutions can adapt to emerge stronger from the COVID-19 crisis, we’ll continue the discussion about monetizing content, and discuss redefining the museum brand by making it more connected to community.
Retool Lab is a collaborative focused on helping cultural, entertainment and public institutions regroup, reshape, and retool their strategy to recover from the economic impact of the current crisis, and to use these insights as a springboard to thrive far into the future. You can contact us at info@retoollab.com or at www.retoollab.com