I have a subscription to the danish newspaper, Weekendavisen. They have some great articles on society, sciences and politics. Articles that are still relevant many years after first being published. The other day I wanted to look-up an old article, so I went to the website, to search their archive. I signed-up using my customer number.

After signing up I went to the Avisen-section, only to find

1. four (open and free) articles,
2. an non-mechanical read audio-version of the entire, last newspaper (a quite cool feature),
3. an e-paper.dk version of a PDF (These flash/PDF/e-paper viewers are useless gimicks with no real value to anyone. And if you are foced to use one, please use a propper one),
4. and the archive – which you for an additional fee can get access to. Now, the prices is 49 DKK for seven days of access to the database, so my temptation was resistible.

You can complain about the prices being to high, and I think most will, but that is not what this post is about. This post is about Weekendavisen cheating themselves of potential profits. According to FDIM they have around 6.000 unique cookies a week. If just 1% of those pay every single week (and that is in my experience a very high estimate), it will amount to a revenue of 2.940 DKK a week. Or 12. 783 DKK a month, and a tiny fraction more from the extra advertising revenue that those 1% generate.

The Missing Equation

My hypothesis is that by making their entire archive – minus the last years articles (to avoid market cannibalism) – open, free and indexable. They can get more visits and generate a much greater monthly revenue, than they do today, solely from their advertising.

If they already have digitalized all their articles the cost of granting access to everyone will be minimal. They can still keep the pay wall for the audio-versions and for articles that are less than 12 months old.

I was only able to find prices from 2008; Two formats with a Cost per thousand (CPM) of respectively 250 DKK and 200 DKK. Provided that they were able to sell both formats and they were on every page, Weekendavisen would only need 6.533 extra page-views a week to break-even with todays 1% revenue. Today they have approximately 30.000 page-views a week according to FDIM, hence the objective is to get an 22% increase in page-views from releasing their entire article archive. This objective sounds quite reasonable. Note: (2940/(200+250))*1000 = 6.533

The only thing they would have to insure was that their articles where indexed by Google (and preferably also search engine optimized), and Google would supply the new extra visitors that would to drive up revenue.

Unfortunately I was unable to find any model or equation that could be used to calculate and support the last claim. Something on the lines of “more content, more traffic”. Or even better yet, a model that not only looked at content as a whole, but more specifically number of words, since Weekendavisen’s four open articles range between 460-2.400 words each. Anyway the general notion is that it’s easier to gain keyphrase relevancy when Google has more words to choose from.

Anyways…

I am hoping weekendavisen will try the above-mentioned calculations with they own numbers (1% was just my guess). And even test what their indexed word count vs number of non-branded visits from search engines, to get a sense of what their content is worth.

I have only discussed the direct revenues from this – customer satisfaction is priceless.

If anybody else has some numbers of interest or the missing equation please comment.

A similar water purifier-system was recently demoed at TEDGlobal, by Michael Pritchard. The Lifesaver; which can make the most revolting water drinkable in seconds. As seen in the video below.

Honestly I am not certain what the difference is between the Lifesaver and the LifeStraw. But they seem to use similar techniques and more importantly for this post, none of them seem to have a determined plan for distributing their wonderful technology to the previously mentioned one billion people – that is the entire one billion.

Jurying from their website, Lifesaver seems to target soldiers and participants of various outdoor activities. Hence the Lifesaver can be bought online and has distributers in the US and UK. While you can’t discredit Michael Pritchard & co, because the invention can in fact be a life saver, it is highly unlikely that these to groups are include in the category “without access to clean drinking water”. So how does the Lifesaver get in the hands of the one billion in actual need for it? The LifeStraw has taken a more tradition donation approach. You’re not able to buy the LifeStraw on their website, but you can donate one. But with a $6 prices tag per person per year (their own calculations based on data from the World Health Organization) that still amounts to 6 billion dollars a year if you want clean drinking water for all.

Michael Pritchard has calculated that his Lifesaver Bottle can supply clean water for three years to a family of four for 1/2 cent a day. That is 152,1 million a year for clean drinking water for all – a number much easier to grasp. But does that include the distribution cost? Michael Pritchard still need to come up with a viable solution on how families without access to clean drinking water, will get access to the Lifesaver Bottle. Are they supposed to go online with their credit cards, order and wait for a package in the post, like the outdoor athletes? Or how will one billion people get their hands on the Lifesaver/LifeStraw technology?