Added value, or, The hole in the toothbrush

By Allen Quicke Jul 20, '09

To explain why a crazy new website called atimes.net has come into being, we must begin by looking at the humble toothbrush.

A tongue-in-cheek history of the toothbrush
The design of the toothbrush was perfected at the dawn of time. A wooden handle, with some animal’s bristles sticking out at one end, and a hole at the other end so it could conveniently and hygienically be hung from the nearest thorn or nail.

Then came a great technological advance: plastic! This miracle substance was going to change the world and bring incalculable benefits to humanity, they said. Change the world it did, but whether it benefited humanity, apart from the purveyors of toothbrushes, is highly debatable.

For, ever since, “advances” in toothbrush design have been made solely in the area of making bristles that wear out faster, so that the brush salesmen can move more of their junk, more quickly, at our expense. Sure, they’re prettier, positively space-age-looking, but this does not help one keep one’s teeth intact. Oh, and they got rid of that irritatingly expensive little hole at the end of the handle. Peter Sellers, and his good citizen of Balham (Gateway to the South), whose life-time job it was to make the holes, are turning in their graves.

We’re getting to the point. But first …

A true history of the Computer Age
The advent of the Computer Age was, like plastic, going to change the world and bring incalculable benefits to humanity. Productivity advances brought about by computerization would mean we would all experience a sharp improvement in our quality of life, working fewer hours for more money. That’s what they said – really!

And then the invention of the Internet brought the promise that we would have at our fingertips all the useful information and data we could ever need or want. It didn’t work out quite like that. A visit to the local public library is probably not much more time consuming than locating and verifying the useful information that lies buried in cyberspace’s welter of trivia and rubbish, the vast percentage of which is highly untrustworthy, as the Internet allows any buffoon to publish anything he/she wants. 

”Ah, but News! Be instantly informed about what is going on anywhere in the world,” they said, “and read about it in the website of your choice. All for free!”

”Hold on,” said the doubters, perhaps mindful that technological advances had done little for the toothbrush, “if news coverage is any good, how can it be free?”

“Because the Internet opens up a whole new advertising paradigm that will result in money pouring in for the publishers of free news content,” said the touters. “Just imagine,” they enthused, “people will click on web advertisements and be taken directly to the advertisers’ websites, where the captivated visitors will spend oodles of money; and the delighted advertisers will pay the referring websites bundles for these visits.”

We know better now, but the chain of events that brought us to our present pass was highly predictable. Nobody clicked on the stupid ads except children and idlers; advertisers realized that the true value of an ad – especially, but not only, an Internet ad - was very low; and the news sites - indeed, news media in general - found they were unable to sustain their need for exclusive news content on the pittance that advertisers were now prepared to pay them. Equally bad for the news sites, the burgeoning number of them meant the Internet advertising dollar was spread ever thinner.

So the quality of news media, like the toothbrush, went downhill as the bristles at the business end (news content, to push the analogy) became ever more flimsy, and the value-adding hole at the other end (providing a better service to readers) was dispensed with.

In the offices of Newts Corp
History records the following conversation that took place in Rumppert Mudrock’s puddle at Newts Corp just a few weeks ago:

Rumppert: Laughlung, I’ve had an epiphany. The conventional advertising model for news websites is defunct! Our sites are making no money! But I have a solution: we’ll make the suckers pay to read them! Tell all our editors to run this story.

Laughlung: But dad, everyone knows already that the advertising revenue model does not work. And many news sites have tried charging readers, with disastrous results. Anyway, none of our news operations in any medium makes money. If it wasn’t for America Idle, where we get $600,000 for a 30 second ad, we’d be …

Rumppert: Shut up, Laughlung. Have you forgotten the humble toothbrush?

Laughlung: No dad, I always have it with me in my top pocket. It’s a super-duper special one disguised as a fountain pen, though it was a bit embarrassing when I tried signing the WSJ deal with it ...

Rumppert: Strewth, I mean darn it, Laughlung, toothbrush makers survive by being able to charge the same amount, more often, for toothbrushes that are cheaper to make. If I have learnt anything, it’s that there’s no difference between news and toothbrushes, so why can’t we do the same? Get my Troubleshooter in here.

[Troubleshooter scuttles in, kowtows, and Mudrock repeats his question.]

Troubleshooter: But sir, we’ve been imitating toothbrush makers for ages. We got rid of those pesky, expensive reporters and replaced them with bimbos and talking heads who think just like you; what used to be called “leaks” - self-serving, politicking, agenda-pushing tit-bits handed to our poodles by our political masters - we now call “scoops”; we manage to avoid troublesome, politically unpopular issues - like why we went to war with Iraq - by “embedding” reporters and playing footsie with the White House, although that’s not as much fun as it used to be, after the voters disobeyed our instructions; and as for technological advances, we use them all to produce new, cheaper junk and persuade people that they can’t live without it – take MySpace for example …

Rumppert: You’re fired. Laughlung, hire a new Troubleshooter. Tell our bimbos that from now on they will appear topless on Fox Nudes, I mean Newts. There’s added value for you! Tell The Naked News we’re buying them – they’re competition. And get my lawyer in here - I want to change my will.

What is a poor news website to do?
They have come up with a variety of “solutions”. “Easy,” said one publisher, who thought of it long before Mudrock, “We’ll make them pay to read the news that we have to buy.” Bad idea. The publisher soon woke up to the fact that the only reason people visited his dumb website at all was because it was free.

”OK,” said another publisher, “we’ll solve that problem by leaving most of the site free, but charging the suckers to read our super-duper special content.” Bad idea. It turned out that nobody wanted to visit a news site only to read its second-rate free content. This publisher made a bit of money from subscriptions, but not enough to offset the loss of ad revenue, miserable as it was, as non-payers left the site in droves.

”Oh,” said another fellow who liked to call himself a publisher, “we’ll simply stop being a news provider and become a service provider. B2B is the answer!” Remember B2B – business to business? This was big before the Internet bubble burst – a time when Asia Times Online itself fought off a move to turn it into a B2B site. Believe it or not, we were to make money by putting cement buyers in touch with cement sellers. How mortarfying. Thank heavens the bubble burst when it did.

Now, it’s just remotely possible that Mudrock has a critical mass of websites to make it feasible for all news sites to adopt the tried-and-failed pay-to-read model. But unless a great majority of them – including all the better ones – follow Mudrock’s lead, the likely upshot is that pay sites will simply lose readers and ad revenue to the free sites.

”Well,” says Mudrock, “We won’t lose readers because I know the market and I give the people what they want. And now they are going to have to pay for it, or I will spit the dummy, and then we’ll see who’s crying.”

“Nonsense,” Mudrock’s new Troubleshooter retorts (he takes his title too seriously and has a short life expectancy), “You and your ilk have a near-monopoly in the news media, which means you can give the people whatever YOU want. The people have no idea what they are missing, so they adore your bimbos and bumboys, whatever they have to say. But it’s extremely debatable whether people will pay good money to hear, see or read them. There’s plenty of free porn and propaganda on the web.”

The hole in the toothbrush
Amid all the blather about business models for news publishers in all media and the web in particular, one idea is conspicuous by its absence. This idea is that there may be little wrong with the tried-and-failed business models, and their failures may simply be due to the shoddiness of the news product the sites are trying to sell. This is where Mudrock gets it wrong: one needs a toothbrush, however shoddy, but one can’t brush one’s teeth with news, and in fact one is probably better off without shoddy news.

It seems not to have occurred to Mudrock or his competitors that they might consider adding value to their product, rather than devaluing it and expecting to be able to foist it onto the paying public.

It has, however, occurred to Asia Times Online, and hence the launch of atimes.net, the twin-sister publication of atimes.com. Atimes.net pioneers a fresh business model for online news publishing: we call it “pay-for-added-value”, and it’s a stark contrast to the “pay to read the same dumb website that used to be free” model that is inexplicably back in vogue.

For a detailed introduction to atimes.net’s features, please click here: Atimes.net: A new star in cyberspace. Click here, http://www.atimes.net, to visit the home page.

Allen Quicke is Editor-in-Chief of atimes.net. He welcomes your feedback. If you have a comment or suggestion regarding the site, please go to The Edge, our readers’ forum, sign up if you aren’t a member - it’s free and instantaneous – and post your comment in the To the Editor category.

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