US industry news website Editor & Publisher has removed the paywall from its website. Says its publisher:
Paywalls in name alone connote a psychological negative, which is one reason we have never been big believers. [Former owner] Nielsen had been using one for a number of years, but nothing during the past year has changed our opinion about them. We have removed it to build more traffic and make more of our original content available to our visitors.
Dave Lee offers some interesting ideas on how a virtual gifts or credit model implemented via Facebook could help newspaper publishers rethink their revenue models.
Am I telling everyone that newspapers need to start deploying farm-based games across their sites? No, don’t be silly. What I am saying is that people’s desire to have Facebook Credits in order to play online games is, for editors, a gift from the gods. Suddenly, we’ve got millions of people – young people, don’t forget – who have credits. Credits which they didn’t buy to read news but, now they’ve got them won’t give much thought to spending a couple on content.
The newspaper would, on current rates (dictated by Facebook), take 70 per cent of each credit’s monetary value.
I believe, ladies and gents, that’s what we call a business model.
Press+, the paywall and micropayment system launched by US venture Journalism Online, has added new features to its technology aimed at signing up student media partners in the US and attracting payments from off-campus users, such as parents and alumni.
In 2011 the Daily O’Collegian at Oklahoma State University will launch the system on its website, ocolly.com, a release states.
The paper will collect a small fee from online readers who are outside the school’s immediate geographic area and who do not use an email address with an .edu affiliation and who read the paper online more than three times a month. This is achieved by deploying two aspects of the Press+ platform in tandem: the “meter” technology combined with “geo-targeting” technology.
Full release via Smudged Newsprint at this link…
Journalism Online was launched in April 2009, and won investment from News Corp in June 2010. Its first client was LancasterOnline.com, which began using the Press+ system in July to charge for its access to its obituary pages. Last month non-profit investigative journalism organisation ProPublica signed up to the system.
News from the Financial Times yesterday that Telegraph.co.uk could start charging for content prompts this post from Seamus McCauley on why a Telegraph paywall might just work at this time:
The paywall strategy makes sense for the Telegraph if its management believes two things.
First, that the online news landscape is changing so that professional news – especially, perhaps, professional conservative newspaper journalism – becomes markedly scarcer online … Second, that the Telegraph’s current monetisation strategy – which is to attract a mass audience and show them display and search ads – is coming to an end.
There’s much more detail behind this arguments, so its worth reading the full post on virtualeconomics at this link…
The Financial Times is reporting that Telegraph Media Group is planning to introduce a charge for access to its online news content.
According to the report, the payment barrier could be brought in late next year and sources have told the FT that it will not be “an impregnable paywall like the Times” but most likely a metered system, as employed by the Financial Times itself.
A TMG spokesperson told the FT that no decisions have been made on the introduction of a paid-content model.
Media commentator, digital soothsayer and all-round interesting read Clay Shirky gives his views on News International’s paywalls at the Times and Sunday Times, the first figures for which were released last week.
‘Paywall thinking’, he suggests, may not be possible in a world where “the internet commodifies the business of newspapers”:
Over the last 15 years, many newspaper people have assumed continuity with the analog business model, which is to say they assumed that readers could eventually be persuaded or forced pay for digital editions. This in turn suggested that the failure of any given paywall was no evidence of anything other than the need to try again.
What is new about the Times’ paywall – what may in fact make it a watershed – isn’t strategy or implementation. What’s new is that it has launched as people in the news business are rethinking assumed continuity. It’s new because the people paying attention to it are now willing to regard the results as evidence of something. To the newspaper world, TimesSelect looked like an experiment. The Times and Sunday Times look like a referendum on the future.
After months of waiting, News International released figures for its much-discussed Times and Sunday Times paywalls today.
According to a release from the group, the Times and Sunday Times have more than 105,000 “paid-for customers to date”. This figures includes subscribers to the websites and to the Times’ iPad app and Kindle editions. Around half of these are monthly subscribers, News International says, adding that “many of the rest” are either single copy or pay-as-you go sales.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, the Times’ editor James Harding said it was “early days” but that he was “hugely encouraged” by the figures so far:
What we’ve seen is for the first time in 225 years we’re selling copies of the Times on something other than paper; we’re seeing that those people who read the digital editions of the Times and the Sunday Times really like them, if they sign up for a trial they tend to stick with us; and most importantly we’re able to say something that very few papers can say which is that we’re growing …
What you get now is you see over a couple of million people who look at the front page of the Times online … we’d engaged in quite a suicidal form of economics which was giving our journalism away for free and we knew that if we continued to do that we couldn’t invest in reporting. So what our concern was was would be cut off from the internet conversation and the truth is that we haven’t been, because a) the media works as a huge echo chamber so our stories get picked up and the other thing we’re seeing is that our readers engage with or stories and comment on our stories in a much deeper way …
What you’re seeing here is something at it’s very early stages, but also a revelation as well as a revolution in journalism. The iPad edition for us has changed the way we are doing our journalism and technology as we all know can be a tricky business.
This week it was reported that Amazon is looking to open up newspaper and magazine subscriptions bought for the Kindle onto any digital platform that runs Kindle apps.
Reporting on the news, Editors Weblog and paidContent question whether this will appeal to news publishers already managing or planning their own subscription models across platforms such as the iPad and iPhone. Summing up Editors Weblog says:
The new feature may not be the best idea for those already selling their own multi-platform subscriptions or who want to control their brands on other devices. The Wall Street Journal will not partake in the digital content exchange, and The New York Times has been less than forthright about its plans for being included, saying “We’ll be announcing our bundle details when we launch the details of our paid model.”
US political news site Politico will launch a subscription news service early next year, reports the New York Times.
The new service will focus on healthcare, energy and technology and run alongside the existing website and free daily publication.
The idea behind the service, which will cost subscribers $1,495 to $2,500 a year for the first topic and $1,000 for each subsequent topic, is to provide coverage at the microlevel of what Congress, federal agencies and trade associations are doing.
Following News of the World’s launch of its paywall last week, Marketing magazine reports on similar plans at the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror.
Daily Mirror columnists, including political writer Paul Routledge and sports columnist Oliver Holt, will provide the foundation for the title’s premium content strategy. However, the Daily Mirror’s general news will remain free.