In that potential dust-up, it’s notable that the Journalism Online plan calls for taking a 20% commission on subscription revenues (plus a 3% commission on credit card transactions), while Google says it would charge 30% for clients using its revamped Checkout platform. The plans were a response to a request for proposals from the Newspaper Association of America that published them in a report to its members this week.

Here are a two items that have been largely overlooked in the coverage so far:

First, the Journalism Online e-commerce model (available at the Nieman Lab) will let publishers change variables like the price of subscriptions or micropayments to fit their own markets. Publishers will also be able to turn the knob on advertising, apparently, changing settings so that “paid subscribers see fewer, different or no advertisements.”

Could this finally lead to the ad-free news that some consumers have sought for so long? The Journalism Online model does not aim to replace advertising revenue with subscriptions. Instead, the model says advertising revenue lost to the pay wall (and subsequent decline of unique visitors) by commanding a 30% cpm premium on the subscriber base that remains. Clearly, a no-ad product would come at a premium, but how much would publishers have to charge subscribers who want to turn that knob all the way down?

Second, Brill et al. say their platform will let publishers sell products against content. The 15th and last item on a list of product capabilities is the “ability to sell related goods via participating retailers (such as books within book reviews).” As we noted earlier, the UK’s Telegraph has developed an e-commerce platform that now accounts for roughly 30% of all revenues. They sell everything from home gardening products to panama hats. And, instead of erecting paywalls around general news content, they have subscriptions and micropayments for secondary products like fantasy soccer and puzzles.

Sadly, the Journalism Online plan does not provide an estimate of how much money news sites could make by selling products through a contextual e-commerce platform. But, if the Telegraph’s experience is any guide, what seems to be an afterthought here could become a significant revenue stream for the group that can pull it off.

New Advertising Units (Sponsor Posts, Coupons & Deals of the Day, Video)
E-commerce
Paid Content
Lists & Databases
Mobile
Premium Products
Niche Websites
Donations
Print Editions
Special Reports
Memberships
Specialized Advertising Services
Business Marketplace
Events Hosting & Promotion
Cafés

Thanks for all of the comments and suggestions. Please keep ‘em coming.

From this first list, I was surprised by how many of the folks pointed to the value of a printed product. It is the most noteworthy area, of many, where my early assumptions were proven incorrect.

Jeff Mignon and Nancy Wang of Mignon-Media have been helping us with this project and were instrumental in developing this list of revenue opportunities.

So we’ve been a bit surprised at how few are experimenting with e-commerce, which is frequently held up as a strong potential revenue stream for online news. Sure, we’ve heard from a few sites making good money from t-shirt sales and affiliate programs.

But American publishers should heed the experience of the Telegraph in the UK, which started launching a series of e-commerce efforts in 2008. The 154-year-old newspaper now says that a hefty percentage of its revenues come from online users buying those goods and services directly through the site. That’s a nice figure going onto the P&L as advertising revenues continue to shrivel.

“One shouldn’t expect advertising on its own to support the costs of a newsroom,” says Edward Roussel, the Telegraph’s digital editor. “E-commerce is less cyclical, less prone to downturn and more reliable as a revenue stream.”

The Telegraph has been quite successful getting readers to pay for access to games or to services that highlight the organization’s databases. The site’s fantasy football and cricket service and CluedUp, a brand aimed at puzzle nuts, have been perhaps most successful. The Telegraph also gets a commission on transactions made with their personal finance and sports betting partners.

Of course, the Telegraph sells merchandise, too, ranging from tulips or a pond vacuum in the garden store, to Panama hats sold in the travel section. Roussel says developing a system that seamlessly matches product to editorial content is still a challenge, but he envisions a day when the e-commerce gardening application will recognize the rose in an article and serve up offers for that rose or something close to it.

Roussel says not all merchandise lines work as well as others, saying the fashion shop, for one, hasn’t broken through as hoped.

“That’s not how people view a site like ours, they don’t view us as a destination to shop,” he says. “That means we have to work harder to come up with the partners that will work.”

Roussel says that publishers need to embrace the ways in which the web has drastically “shortened the transaction chain” between advertiser and consumer. Whereas advertising used to be about delivering information to readers so they could then go out to make a purchase, Roussel says, “now we can say: do it here and now. That’s the value added for news sites–allowing people to make the acquisition on the spot.”

Far better, he thinks, for news sites to embrace this updated approach–providing valuable services for a fee–than to erect paywalls around content that in the age of Google is readily available elsewhere (an opinion echoed here today).

“The fundamental value of journalism is that you pull in a wide audience, then you can direct them to a series of high value services that they’ll pay for,” Roussel says.