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.
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.
Mark Colvin of Australia’s PM radio programme has an interview up today with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. It focuses on the recent publication of figures from behind the Times and Sunday Times paywalls and finds Rusbridger as determined as ever to keep his paper free and champion open online journalism.
Comparing the Times’ new ‘slimmed-down’ online audience – which Rusbridger estimates to be about 30,000-50,000 users a month, against 37 million for the Guardian – he says the two newspapers’ digital operations now represent “two completely different ideas of size, scale and ambition”.
Perhaps the most interesting thing the Guardian editor has to say concerns the effect of the paywall on print sales, which he was expecting to rise when free digital access disappeared. The Times print circulation hasn’t plummeted since, but it certainly hasn’t shown significant gains: circulation fell by 14.81 per cent year-on-year in September, second only to the Telegraph and higher than the 12.3 per cent average for quality titles. August saw the Times’ average daily circulation slip below 500,000 for the first time since 1994.
As Rusbridger points out, the digital arm of the newspaper, rather than acting as a plain substitute which draws readers away from the print edition when free and drives them to it when paid, may serve to promote the whole brand. It may well act “like a sort of marketing device for the newspapers”, he says.
If you put a gigantic wall around your content and disappear from the general chatter and conversation about your content then people forget to buy the paper as well. So it’s a kind of double whammy.
Rusbridger continues to be one of the industry’s most vocal objectors to the paywall. As he says here, he believes that “the journalist organisations that are best placed to survive are the ones that are going to go with the technology rather than decrying it and fighting it”. To that end, his “overwhelming aim is just to keep on producing the Guardian in a form which will suit whatever technology people invent”.
Colvin asks Rusbridger about the Guardian’s increasing digital revenue – “we’re up well over 50 per cent year-on-year and last year we earned about £40 million”, Rusbridger claims – but not, disappointingly, about the paper’s tactics in any detail, its success at bringing in money in through affiliate projects for example. Tim Brooks, managing director of Guardian News and Media, landed a blow for the Guardian’s approach earlier in the week, putting the Times’ new paywall revenue in a particularly unflattering context: “We’re probably making more money from our online dating service”, he told the MediaPro conference.
No mention of the Guardian’s own losses from Colvin or Rusbridger though. Despite the paper’s continued growth of digital revenue and laudable approach to online journalism, they are still running pretty high.
Video publishing platform Ooyala is using PayPal to create a paywall option for clients. The Ooyala Paywall will make it easier for publishers to earn revenue from live and on-demand videos on their sites, says the firm.
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.
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.
John Fry, head of Johnston Press, has ruled out future paywalls for JP’s newspaper websites, following the unsuccessful trial on selected sites late last year.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, Fry says:
While a respectable number of users were prepared to pay, it wasn’t enough to offset the slump in ad revenues.
As Fry says: “With the internet it’s free and has been from the beginning. After 15 years of free it’s hard to change people’s habits.”
Apps and media mergers are more likely to help the regional press, he says.
Not much of a surprise perhaps – the Boston Globe, also owned by the New York Times company, has announced plans for a new paywalled website in the second half of 2011.
The paid-for site BostonGlobe.com will feature news, features, photojournalism and full stories from the daily and Sunday editions of the paper; the current website Boston.com will remain as part of the subscription and registration model and will focus on sport, local news, arts and culture.