Tag Archives: pay walls

Will the Shropshire and Wolverhampton walls pay?

Part-paywalls have gone up at the UK’s biggest-selling regional daily, the Wolverhampton-based Express and Star, and at sister title, the Shropshire Star. Breaking news will remain free but other content, such as football reports, are now behind the wall.

But will Wolverhampton and Shropshire pay?

At £2.19 more a month than the Times, is £12.18 too high a price for a monthly digital-only subscription?

Last week the Times, which went behind a paywall last summer, announced that it has 79,000 digital subscribers and the Financial Times, which has been behind a metered pay model for 10 years as of yesterday, also claims success with 210,000 subscribers.

But the Times and FT have their own reasons for tens of thousands of digital subscribers. The Times had a huge push to create high-value content as it went behind the wall and the Financial Times is perhaps best seen as a specialist publication with a wealthy readership prepared to pay for financial news.

Paywalls put up by UK regional newspapers have been less successful. Johnston Press trialled a paywall in 2009, testing it on some of the group’s smaller websites, the Southern Reporter in Scotland, the Northumberland Gazette and the Whitby Gazette, charging just 40 pence a week for access. The wall was dismantled after three months as it was deemed not viable.

There is a difference in the Express and Star’s approach and Johnston Press’ tactics though, in that the Wolverhampton and Shropshire titles are trying to push their print subscriptions, adding digital as an optional extra and are charging just 40 pence a week more for the print, online and smartphone deal than digital-only.

The exact cost may not be the deciding factor in whether readers decide to get their credit cards out. The Johnston Press paywall was very cheap – just £1.71 a month – but few paid. The New York Times, which went behind a metered-paywall last week, believes readers will pay up to $35 a month, which is the cost for a combined online, iPad and smartphone subscription (though readers were eased in with a £0.99 a month charge).

The Express and Star has taken the bold step of becoming the first major regional newspaper in the UK to go behind the wall. If it invests in high value content, makes payment easy, has an engaged audience already and can convince advertisers a quality rather than a quantity of online readers is more important, then the wall might work. If not, then the wall may come tumbling down.

Express and Star deputy editor Keith Harrison has told Journalism.co.uk he is confident the premium content site will be a success.

The New York Times paywall: what do people think?

So what have people been saying about the New York Times paywall (or fence, ramp, meter, porous paywall, nagwall or even ‘metered-access digital subscription system’, if you prefer)?

It was announced yesterday that the paywall is going up on March 28. A metered system will allow readers to access 20 articles a month for free and it will be free for those who land on a page via a link from Twitter, Facebook, a search engine or blog.

So, how much money will it make? paidContent has done the maths and reckons around 500,000 people will sign up, generating $100 million.

And what is everyone saying about it?

Online Journalism Blog is encouraged that the NYT model will work, as it recognises the importance of distribution (via Twitter and Facebook) and balancing quantity with quality for advertisers.

Newsonomics thinks the timing is good, coinciding with the launch of the iPad 2 in America.

The Nieman Journalism Lab says the NYT faces seven tests if it is to succeed.

The Online Journalism Review is encouraged by the business model but thinks customers will go elsewhere for news.

10,000 Words looks at paywall models and compares NYTs strategy with the Wall Street Journal and Newsday.

Poynter takes a look at tweets on the subject (including some quite funny ones like “If the NYT paywall gets torn down, Reagan will probably get credit”).

The Cutline looks at what readers of the NYT think of it (not much, judging by many of the comments).

One of the most interesting points is made by TechCrunch, which says the pricing structure is unfair and “discriminates by device” (The NYT’s charging $15 a month for web access, $20 to add smartphones or a an iPad, and $35 for all).

In other words, if you are shelling out $20 a month for the iPad subscription, and you want to also be able to read it on your iPhone, you basically have to pay the full smartphone subscription price, or an additional $15 a month. That seems like a rip-off. A digital subscription should be a digital subscription, and it shouldn’t matter what kind of computer you use to read the paper on. But okay, the iPad and other tablets are different, I might pay a little more for the tablet apps. But once I step up to pay the New York Times $20 a month for its iPad app, that should include access via the iPhone app as well.

Scripting also makes an excellent point about “frequent linkers”, who will have to pay to deliver readers to the NYT.

They did something smart in not charging readers who get to a Times story through a link from a blog post or tweet. But – since I am a frequent linker, I wonder why I should pay to read their site, when I’m delivering flow to them. How does that equation balance by me paying them? Maybe they should pay me? Seriously.

Elsewhere on paidContent, Bill Grueskin, former managing editor of the subscription-based Wall Street Journal Online, predicts the NYT can expect a big number of early subscribers.

He is also one of many to point out that there are ways over the wall.

According to sources close to the situation, the 20-story limit can be breached if you access the site from multiple devices, and/or if you delete your cookies. In other words, suppose you hit the wall on your PC. Then move to your laptop, where you’ll get another 20 stories. Delete your cookies on any computer, and the clock goes back to zero.

Roy Greenslade has also been reading about how to jump over the wall: by finding a story, pasting the headline into a search engine and accessing the linked story for free.

Perhaps the most revolutionary way to sneak around the wall is this idea is reported in the the Atlantic.

So, cheapskates, meet @freenyt, a three-hour old Twitter feed that intends to tweet all the Times stories.

That works as articles linked via twitter are free. But the article does point out:

Maybe we can even think of the Times paywall as akin to old-school shareware that didn’t force you to upgrade but just hit you with a nag screen (a nagwall?).

Knight Center: What the Waco Tribune-Herald has learned from its premium content model

Four months ago, the Waco Tribune-Herald launched a premium content payment model, keeping breaking news, obituaries and other sections free but introducing levies on more in-depth work.

Knight Digital Media Center blogger Michele McLellan has posted an interview with Tribune-Herald editor Carlos Sanchez, and although he can’t divulge the numbers it sheds some light on how communities may respond to such a model.

Q. How do you decide what content is for online subscribers only?

Our strategy from the beginning was to keep things as simple as possible. Generally, if it’s a wire story that is available at other websites, it’s free; if it is something locally produced, it’s behind a pay wall.

There are broad exceptions: staff written blogs, breaking news and, most important, obituaries (are free). Our thinking behind the blogs was that our reporters could offer more of a social media feel, with links to content behind the pay wall. Ideally, it would replicate the kind of banter that we hear every day in a newsroom in which the story behind the story becomes just as fascinating as the story itself.

Clay Shirky on the Times paywall, commodity markets and a ‘referendum on the future’

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.

Full post by Clay Shirky at this link…

TheMediaBriefing: What news publishers can learn from supermarkets

Patrick Smith maps out “the [Tesco] Clubcard model for news”:

To stretch analogy out to news, what’s for sale on your shelves? The kind of thing you think consumers are after, or what you know they want to buy? In a print age there is only hope and focus grouping: the call is made by the editor and publisher each day what goes into the paper both editorially and commercially, largely based on flimsy research and an instinctive understanding of a title’s brand.

Full post on TheMediaBriefing at this link…

E&P: Knight Foundation to help fund paywalls for non-profit news sites

Paywall technology venture Journalism Online will see its Press+ system introduced to non-profit news sites in the US as part of a deal with the Knight Foundation.

The first 10 sites that receive grants from the Foundation will not have to share revenue from the system with Journalism Online for the first year. Hyperlocal professional news site the New Haven Independent is the first to sign up.

Full story on E&P at this link…

Murdoch hails iPad as ‘perfect platform’

Rupert Murdoch is bullish about the role that the iPad and tablet computers will play in the future of publishing and journalism. According to a report by the Australian, Murdoch told an industry event this week in Sydney that tablet computers were “a perfect platform for our content”.

Murdoch added that subscriber levels to the newly paywalled Times website were “strong”:

It’s going to be a success. Subscriber levels are strong. We are witnessing the start of a new business model for the internet. The argument that information wants to be free is only said by those who want it for free.

Full story on the Australian at this link…

Journalism Online paid content system gets first user with obits paywall

Paid content system Journalism Online has its first user, reports Poynter. Lancaster Online, website for the Intelligencer Journal and Lancaster New Era titles in the US, will use the micropayments platform to paywall its obituaries from today.

Readers outside of Lancaster County will be free to view up to seven obits, after which they will have to pay $1.99 a month or $19.99 for an annual subscription.

Journalism Online was set up by former US newspaper executives Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery in June last year and received investment from News Corp last month.

Lancaster Online’s obituary pay scheme would “not amount to enough to reverse the fortunes of our newsroom, in and of itself”, admits the site’s editor of content development Ernie Schreiber. “But it might be a model for the next steps in how we meter other content (…) And it might pay for a few reporters.”

Poynter’s Bill Mitchell criticises certain elements of the move, including the fact that Lancaster Online is simply moving established content behind a paywall and not offering anything new to incentivise would-be customers:

One area where Lancaster falls short: providing customers with significant new value to persuade them to spend money today for something they got yesterday for free. How many more obit subscriptions might LancasterOnline sell, in other words, if it were to bundle customized obit newsletters as part of its monthly or annual fee?

Research suggests however that there is a healthy market for obituaries within the Lancaster Online readership. According to Schreiber, more than five per cent of the 47.4 million pages viewed the previous year were obituaries, and 100,000 readers outside of the county accessed an obituary page over that year.

Journalism Online’s Gordon Crovitz said Lancaster’s launch of the Journalism Online system will be followed by “many other launches over the summer”.

He claimed that the most popular “will be metered access to a website as a whole rather than a focus on a particular area of content”.

Full story at this link…

Daily Intel: Lessons for other publishers from the Times paywall

With the New York Times expected to introduce paid access to its website from 2011, the Daily Intel looks at what lessons publishers can learn from the implementation of the UK Times’ paywall, including:

  • make it RSS-friendly;
  • make the price suprisingly low;
  • mind your talent;
  • and deal with the payment transaction early on.

Full post at this link…

Related listening: Podcast from the Association of Online Publishers event on paywalls and diversifying revenue streams with the Times’ assistant editor and head of online, Tom Whitwell.

Martin Belam: Many Times readers might give up on newspaper websites altogether

The Times have always acknowledged that the paywall would mean a drop in traffic. They accept that many former visitors to the site will not be prepared to pay.

But where will they go instead? Will they break their readership loyalities?

The point is taken up by Martin Belam, information architect for the Guardian.co.uk, who says we cannot assume that readers will simply defect to another online newspaper.

Writing on his blog, Belam says to assume so would be to “view our industry through the prism of the newsagent”.

The web isn’t a newsagent. It is rather more like the table in a library with newspapers scattered across it, ready to be picked up and browsed at will.

And unlike the newsagent, that library table is no longer confined to publications ‘registered with the Post Office as a newspaper’.

Many Times readers, he adds, “might just give up on all newspapers websites”.

See the full post here…