The world'd first free customized newspaper.

[zillionaire]

I thought of a business idea that sounded silly at first, but when I went a bit deeper, I couldnt help getting impressed by it. The idea is to start a FREE CUSTOMISABLE newspaper... read on and do let me know what you think about it... Is it really possible? How much funding would I require?....



The world's first free customizable newspaper

th@t! aims to be the world's first free and personally customizable newspaper. Till today the scope for free and customized newspapers was limited to the internet, with giants like google and Yahoo providing free and personalized news content. With news content on the internet getting increasingly free, fast and reliable, traditional newspapers are taking a hit, as their market gets saturated. Newspapers today are cliché and stereotyped and require a revolution of sorts to make them remain globally competitive.

th@t!- Leading the next newspaper revolution

Traditional newspapers have the following drawbacks....

*not free

*not customizable

*minimal reader interaction

On giving it a little more thought, we found we could eliminate these drawbacks altogether with th@t!, the next big thing in the print world.

th@t!- salient features

*its free!

*customized personally by the readers

*customized advertising

*incorporates "th@t! groups", or communities which the reader can join. They receive community news, updates and articles on separate community pages.

*The concept of th@t! mail enables the users to receive personal mail through their morning paper! Your paper can now be your social network!


One might consider being free and personalized as two major obstacles to being profitable. In fact they are absolutely complementary. Here's how...

Through customization each individual receives a copy that is unique and completely different from any other. This means each home gets different papers for different members of the family absolutely free! Assuming four members per family, the demand of th@t! is a staggering 500% compared to a traditional news daily!

Greater demand = less production cost = higher ad rates = more profitability

This is the core logic behind th@t!

[jasaunders]

LOL. And how do you plan on printing all these newspapers? Do you know what it would cost to print one copy of thousands or hundreds of thousands of different papers? Not to mention, it would take too long.

[zillionaire]

The paper is customized using a software. This software picks out the content required for each page from an article reservoir. You dont customize each page yourself.

Another problem would be distribution. You could sort that out by giving a different PIN no to each copy. A 13 digit PIN would work..

Example: XX.X.XXXX.XXXX.XX
Digits 1,2- city
Digit 3- Can be 1,2,3,4 depending on the direction. North, east, west or south
Digits 4,5,6,7- Route no:
Digits 8,9,10,11- House no:
Digits 12,13- copy no:

[SIMPLEROBB]

Sounds interesting. You got my attention

[RickyCeez]

yeah i agree with romane... this may be hard.. but it did grasp my attention

[thomsen-dk]

Great Idea, But it can't be done.

Newpapers are printed from offset plates today at high speeds. (50.000 papers per hour. depending on press) Meaning shift of plates each different print, the costs would be through the roofe.

The only way it can be done is by using variable digital printing, highest speeds today are around 7-8000. And such a machine would have to be completely rebuild to manage such tasks. "Low" speed printing, would also make your paper a lot more expensive.

[Fadzuli]

Hi there.

I'm from Singapore and there's actually a few companies in Singapore that provide free newspapers because the government here are encouraging the citizens to read more.

Anyway these companies did manage to cover their cost and earn profits from expensive advertising. A small column can just cost an advertiser a measly $800 per advert.

Because Singapore is quite small and that made distribution easy. They've place the newspapers at Petrol Kiosk and Train Stations. Usually the papers run out one hour after the papers arrive at the location.

The papers are really getting more competitive these days. It started with one company initially and then a few more sprout out the last few years.

Its a good business though but you really need the high paying advertisers to support you and your distribution points needs to be where there are thousands of people available.

* hope this helps!!

[ladyk5]

where i am from there are plenty of free newspapers, magazines etc....its paid for through advertising...however making them customizable is a different story...people pay for advertising to reach people so allowing it to be a choice for the consumer will defeat the purpose for the advertiser in my opinion...I can see it being done easily online but print distribution, I dont know but good luck nonetheless

[warrensway]

I doubt this can be done, but keep up the research.

[ScottRobertson]

Personally, I don't think that it can be done in a time effective and inexpensive enough way. If you haven't already, research how newspapers are printed (previous posters gave some basic info to base your research on).

As for revenues for this type of paper - there are ups and downs. Because it would be customizable, it would be much easier for the advertisers to reach their target customers (therefore would be willing to pay more). On the flip side it will be hard for you to give advertisers any good stats on what they can expect (unless I am just confused with your plan). I have more pros/cons, but I need to get to bed atm .. pst me if you'd like to discuss it further.

Synopsis: I don't think it is worthwhile.

[byzantium]

Hm. Sounds too complicated. BUT, if you were to do an e-newspaper, that was downloadable into one of those e-book reading devices, you just might have something. For decades science fiction shows have showed people with electronic tablets downloading and reading customized books and newspapers. Today, we have e-books (the vast majority of which are worthless), e-book reading tablets (too expensive for most of the useless e-books out there), but no customizable e-news sites that could be viewed on an e-book tablet. The furthest that "customized" news sites got during the dot.com boom was to have 5 or 6 options that you could click, with the site admins choosing the articles. Do you want political, lifestyle, home decorating, or technology news? Click one and accept what WE the admins stick in there.

Now, follow this. If you could have not just templates, but e-news customizable in a zillion different ways, so that I could choose what *I* want on my e-newspaper, THEN make it downloadable to an e-book tablet every day, you could become extremely rich. But to pull it off, you'd need several rounds of venture capitalist funding, AND family connections in traditional media, AND a rich family that can open all those doors with THEIR network. In other words, it's something that most people here could never pull off. But if you're reading this, and your last name is Rothschild and your dad knows the movers and shakers in traditional media, by all means go for it.

But if you're like most people reading this, ie a business major at a third rate public university in Podunk, Montana, you can't do something this complicated. You don't have the network nor the money. Go to a VC and they'd laugh at you just long enough to give you an out the window trip back to the sidewalk. VC's were BADLY burned on the dot.coms, so now you have to have a rich family backing you up. (VC's blew $1 billion on Webvan alone, only to end up with their stock being worth 6 cents a share before it was worth 0 cents a share when it was delisted. Ouch! Once bitten, twice shy.) VC's don't want anything to do with you unless you've proven yourself and your idea first, and/or have family money. Double bind, anyone?

[SIMPLEROBB]

Don't give up. I think it can be done.

[TheBigIdea]

when i read the morning papers, i want to try to get a little of everything, i'd rather not "tweak" my newspaper settings.

1. i probably will miss out on some other news/events
2. i'm too lazy to tweak my newspaper
3. i just want to have the news that everyone else reads, so i can talk to them about it at work later in the day. if my colleagues don't read the same news as i do, how am i gonna communicate with them on the same "news" level?

an e paper would do the trick, but then i'd rather go to google news, it's "live" and the editors tweak it to suit my preferences ( and if i really need to tweak, i'd just drag and drop a couple of windows, and voila )

i think you need to come up with an idea to try to be different from google news -> then you get a good shot. (just my 2 cents)

[strozewskina]

very interesting stuff, i will definitely check that out.

[efficientpixel]

Hi I am a web designer/developer and I was thinking the same thing and have given it a bunch of thought. There are many obstacles to this idea.

Another problem is the news feeds from all of the different websites. You could build a web application that pulls in your desired RSS news feeds but based on the website they may only provide you with a short excerpt, requiring you to go to their site to read the rest of the article. Websites would rarely ever give you access to the full news articles via an RSS feed because they want you to continue visiting their website. More visitors equal more web traffic with means more paid advertising they can sell. The websites would need to provide a paid RSS feed to make up for their reduction in web traffic. As a whole the internet is trying very hard to make data more accessible to everyone, so we can use it and share it how we like. You can scrap websites for the full content on their webpages, but then you are talking about copyright issues. There is no clear solution to obtaining all of these full news articles for free.