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.
News International’s announcement yesterday that the News of the World’s website will go behind a paywall wasn’t a complete surprise, given the same move by stablemates the Times and Sunday Times in July.
As yet there haven’t been any official figures released by NI about the traffic to its existing paywalled sites. There’s been plenty of speculation and unlike the News of the World’s website, the Times’ site was audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic up until February, when it posted 20,418,256 monthly unique users.
So many questions about the success or progress of the Times and Sunday Times paywalls remain unanswered, prompting more questions about Rupert Murdoch’s decision to add the News of the World site to the paid experiment.
It’s hard to find official stats for traffic to the existing NOTW website. Last October, the site said it had a record traffic day attracting 585,000 visitors from within the UK. For a record traffic month then, the site could attract around 17.5 million UK users. How likely to pay are non-UK users? Some breakdown of the Times and Sunday Times’ figures would be helpful again at this point…
Reports earlier this year suggested that by blocking crawlers from news aggregators from its site the Sun was gearing up for a paywall launch. Possibly, or possibly this can be put down to senior executive’s feelings towards search engines and aggregators.
There are as yet no combined print and digital offers on the table from NOTW. According to the ABC’s figures for August 2010, the average net circulation for the print edition was 2,868,850 a day. Since the launch of its paywalled site the Times’ average daily net circulation has only decline slightly by 1.9 per cent – will the NOTW hold up in the same way?
And finally – it’s not just media reporters that are calling for more transparency and figures in the great paywall experiment. Advertisers and agencies want them too, according to this Bloomberg report:
Starcom MediaVest, which has placed ads for the Emirates airline and Continental Airlines Inc., has cut its advertising on the Times and Sunday Times by more than 50 per cent, Bailes [Chris Bailes, digital trading manager at Starcom MediaVest Group] said. News Corp’s international unit hasn’t communicated with media buyers about its online figures, he said.
“We wouldn’t put our money where we don’t know the numbers, just as you wouldn’t invest in a stock,” Bailes said.
Interesting response from Guardian staffer Stephen Moss to MediaGuardian blogger Roy Greenslade’s post on the News of the World’s plans for a paywall announced yesterday.
Greenslade argues that Rupert Murdoch is “indulging in information protectionism” and with the Times’ and Sunday Times’ paywalled websites has removed the titles from online conversations.
Moss responds in the comments:
Have the Times “dropped out of the national conversation”, whatever that absurdly woolly phrase means. There seems to have been huge discussion (e.g. on Twitter) about their Populus poll findings and Clegg’s incendiary piece on welfare in today’s paper, so they seem still to be absolutely in the ‘national conversation’.
And the fact remains that news orgs have to try to make some dosh. It’s not enough to say paywalls don’t work; you – and the industry – have to come up with a package that does work, which in my view will mean protecting certain print products, paywalling some (tho (sic) by no means all) online material and building networks around information-gathering interest groups which can be monetised by donation and/or through the sale of ancillary products and services. There is no one big answer; there are a range of answers which will add up to a profitable business. And a business that isn’t profitable – and this includes the Guardian – is enfeebled and vulnerable.
Two subsidiaries of communications group WPP are working on a new paid content project, scheduled for launch early next year. Reports the Wall:
The idea behind the Content Project is that users pay a fixed fee each month, giving them an electronic wallet, to access a pool of content. The fee is then shared out between the media owners rather than paying one fee to a single company.
News International’s paywalled newspaper sites TheTimes.co.uk and SundayTimes.co.uk are launching a new feature which aims to enable readers to keep track of stories of interest.
The Dashboard tool will become available to readers on the site over the next few days, an announcement on TheTimes.co.uk says.
We hope this latest addition to our websites will help you to personalise your news and get straight to the stories that are important to you.
The tool will notify readers when their favourite sections publish new articles and when a previously read article is updated. It also provides them with a history of read articles which they can quickly link back to.
Commenting on the new feature, paidContent’s Robert Andrews said the tool shows how the service is taking advantage of its online platform.
You can’t do that in print. It’s also somewhat unique amongst news websites, even if it is essentially a friendlier version of RSS-type functionality.
As online publishers seek new ways of making money from digital news, Robert Niles suggests that news outlets could benefit from using the e-book rental model.
Writing on the Online Journalism Review website, Niles suggests they should capitalise on a model which he says has grown by 71 per cent in the last seven years in the US, especially when it comes to publishing in-depth journalism.
Every year, some top newspaper enterprise reporting projects end up as books. What if some newsrooms flipped the development cycle, and initiated some of their more extensive enterprise reporting projects as e-books, available for sale or for rent?
(…) That makes sense to me. Even as my consumption of news online has sated my appetite for the commodity news I can find in a printed newspaper, I still keep buying books and magazines for longer, more detailed narratives. I happily pay for that content in print because I can’t find an alternative that’s better or cheaper (or both) online.
With TheTimes.co.uk and SundayTimes.co.uk still not releasing traffic figures through the Audit Bureau of Circulations, we can’t yet see the impact of the paywall in terms of browser figures. But according to research published by Enders Analysis, the value of a paywall subscriber is only a fraction of a print reader.
The research, carried out by Benedict Evans, compared annual incomes from subscribers for paywalled newspapers TheTimes.co.uk and WSJ.com with those for UK quality daily papers.
The main findings quoted online are as follows:
A newspaper paywall subscriber is worth only a quarter to a third of a print buyer: even if every single print buyer is successfully converted to the paywall, newspapers will still face a basic problem of scale.
Paywalls will not be able to compensate for lower revenue per reader by expanding the audience for paid news, due to the long term decline of circulation, free online news, 24-hour broadcast news and free-sheets.
Future change will be radical: publishers may need to consider producing a newspaper its loyal readers recognise and value with just 200 rather than 500 journalists.
The News of the World website will go behind a paywall in October, with the Sun to follow, according to a report today by newmediaage.co.uk (article requires subscription). News International are refusing to comment on the claim.
The news was also picked up by mad.co.uk who reported that the paywalled sites will be offered at an “introductory” rate during the first month.
News of the World’s transition to a paid content model will hinge on exclusive video content, distributed across an overhauled site and app.
Yesterday Media Week reported on figures from ComScore, which suggested that unique users of the the Times and Sunday Times websites, which were put behind a paywall in July, have fallen from 2.79 million in May to 1.61 million in July.
Yesterday’s paywall launch on the website of New York Times Company owned paper the Worcester Telegram and Gazette appears to have divided its users, according to a report by the EditorsWeblog.
Following in the footsteps of national publications, the site has introduced a payment model which charges users to access local reports, although does offer a free allowance of up to 10 articles a month. Those with print subscriptions will have not have to pay extra to access content online.
One reader thinks, “as someone who moved from the area 20 years ago, but still likes to think of the area as home, I guess I’ll be looking for a new source to keep current on the news- I won’t be paying to read an article because I think I recognize a name in a byline.” Another writes that, “I will now rely on the local Spencer Leader, Barre Gazette, and word of mouth to alert me news and happenings.
Not all comments are negative, as readers who already have a paid subscription to the print version have full access to the online content. “As a paid subscriber who has been supporting the free online access, I am most pleased with this new policy,” a reader stated.
Media Week reports on figures from ComScore, which suggest that unique users of the the Times and Sunday Times websites have fallen from 2.79 million in May to 1.61 million in July.
The new websites were launched on 25 May with compulsory registration introduced in June and the paywall for both sites going up on 2 July. According to the report, page views for the sites dropped from 29 million in May to 9 million in July.
Prior to the launch of the new websites, News International withdrew from the monthly Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) reports for newspaper website traffic.