Skip to main content

Metered Billing for online content

I just read an interesting case study for metered access to online content in Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community
Pay-per-view article access: a viable replacement for subscriptions?

Apparently Trinity saved more money than they planned to save. Some people who I respect have for a number of years now held the belief that a shift to use based pricing for online journals. But the community of libraries and publishers know that the short term outcome of such a shift would need to be relatively revenue neutral. (As the shift from print to online was. And some publishers created insurance of this during the transition by basing online pricing on past print spend at least for the transition.)

The Trinity case shows an example where the total spend with Elsevier declined by even more than was intended. They attribute this in part to who at Trinity was authorized (students has to ask a librarian). This was not a revenue neutral transition. And it was also not access neutral. The students effectively lost access.

There really is a fixed pool of money available for serials. This can shift from publisher to publisher or bypass the library by going into open access fees but the academic market is not apt to grow much (in North America or Europe) and may well collapse (I may post about his in the future. ) So for the short term any transition to use based pricing needs to be modeled in an environment that has a relatively stable equilibrium. I do not believe metered billing can be introduced on a large scale in a way that will provide the kinds of guarantees that are needed to change the business model generally.

I have in the past been involved with efforts to implement metered billing and believe that as a business model it is an effective way for publishers to compete for a libraries last dollar but not its first.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What should my kids study if there won't be any jobs.

So I'm 49 staring at the big 50.  I work in technology, and I am always learning the newest tech, and the newest view of project management, and the newest business models.  So the other day I was trying to decide between listening to a podcast of delving into my companies continuous learning tools, and I just didn't want to do either. I thought to myself, we never really get any of these things to work properly before we move on to the next thing.  Always learning and changing.  Can't it just stop for a moment and let me catch up?  Of course it won't.  I'm just being 50 and realizing that work isn't going to be a coast for the last 20 years of my career. But it is also something deeper, and scarier. I am not so sure that the future we are heading to is going to be better than today.  In fact I fundamentally believe that there is a good chance it will be worse.  Automation of both mind work and physical work mean that the 7 billion people curr...

registration required (every few months it seems)

On election night 2004 I was following the results hopefully clicking from site to site. Seeing news about polls being kept open by a judge in Missouri and voting machine malfunctioning Ohio. The the signature experience of the evening (other than the deep morbidity that set in the next morning when the results sank in) was registration required newspaper websites. I kept following links from blogs to this or that story and many sites required registration. This was frustrating as my primary email was not webmail. My hard drive based emails were set up on different PCs all over the house. And the speed of these emails was a problem. By election night 2006 I had a plan. and I had set up accounts with major regional papers. This helped, in addition I read a lot on the web about Intellectual property and technology, and have registered with countless sites. (meaning I stopped counting). I understand that these sites need to know a little about me before they give me the content f...

lies in Fouteen40 press release

I really hate when people lie. And I hate it even more when the press reproduces those lies. For example Bryce Johnson of Fourteen40 in a press release about selling his company to Folletts is quoted as saying he came up with the idea about a year ago. Well they pitched my employer about a year ago so I did some research and discovered that they have been failing in the ebook space. http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=41458 Many of the pages I found at that time seem to have disappeared, or are buried under the new stories about the acquisition. But here is one. http://www.vcsmart.com/2006/02/fourteen40.html Not that the product being over a year old makes it bad. But why lie.