Tag Archives: paywalls

David Mitchell breaks ranks to question Guardian paywall stance

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As the Times and Sunday Times’ paywalls went up earlier this month, the Guardian welcomed a former Times blogger and readers to its website with some cheeky editorial.

The Times has done the same with columnists from the paper writing and blogging about their support for paid content. But interesting space on Comment is Free on Sunday was given over to some-time Guardian writer and comedian David Mitchell, who took the title’s strategy to task:

By implying that it thinks content should be free for moral reasons, the Guardian website is playing an extremely dangerous game. It’s an approach which not only makes it hypocritical to charge for the printed newspaper and the iPhone app, but also gives hostages to fortune: what if the Murdoch paywall, or some other “micropayment” system, starts to work? Are we to believe that the Guardian wouldn’t institute something similar? Or would it be happy to be reduced to the online equivalent of a freesheet?

Full post on Comment is Free at this link…

Journalism Online paid content system gets first user with obits paywall

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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

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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

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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…

MediaMemo: Time Inc. on paywall plans and print/iPad-only content

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As reported by Nieman Journalism Lab, Reuters blogger Felix Salmon noticed late last month that a Time Magazine story he had followed a link to online wasn’t there, instead there was this message:

To read TIME Magazine in its entirety, subscribe or download the issue on the iPad.

The next morning the story reappeared in its entirety.

Yesterday reporters at Nieman noticed that “nearly every major article” on Time Magazine’s website was no longer available in full:

Check out the current issue of Time Magazine at Time.com. Click around. Notice anything? On almost every story that comes from the magazine, there’s this phrase: “The following is an abridged version of an article that appears in the July 12, 2010 print and iPad editions of TIME.”

This afternoon MediaMemo has confirmation from parent company Time Inc. that there are title-by-title paywall plans and content across its publications will increasingly be print and iPad only. Spokesman Dawn Bridges outlines the publisher’s policy:

We’ve said for awhile that increasingly we’ll move content from the print (and now iPad) versions of our titles off of the web. With People, we haven’t had hardly any content [SIC] from the magazine on the web for a long time. Our strategy is to use the web for breaking news and ‘commodity’ type of news; (news events of any type, stock prices, sports scores) and keep (most of) the features and longer analysis for the print publication and iPad versions.

Full story at this link…

US newspaper publisher Gannett conducting ‘small-scale’ paywall tests

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The Times finally took the paywall plunge today, but US newspaper giant Gannett has stopped short at dipping its toes.

The publisher is conducting a “small-scale test” by putting subscription services around three of its local titles, reports Poynter Online. The Tallahassee Democrat, Greenville (S.C.) News and (St. George, Utah) Spectrum will charge $9.95 a month for online-only access, fees for web-and-print bundles will vary.

Gannett had “weighed a lot of factors” in selecting three of the publisher’s 81 titles, vice president for news Kate Marymont told Poynter’s Bob Mitchell. “We didn’t want to start at our very largest properties.”

“[W]e know this is not the model,” Marymont acknowledged.

She said the company want to explore the revenue potential of niche content and the effect of paywalls in smaller markets.

“We want to test the idea that our journalism is more of a service than a product, and that we should give readers a selection of delivery methods.”

According to vice-president of corporate communications Robin Pence, the tests will help the company “develop a long term strategy for paid content”.

Full story at this link…

The Times and Sunday Times: What a paywall looks like

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And it’s up – the long awaited News International paywall for the new Times and Sunday Times websites has gone up today. This is the screen you get when you try to go beyond the sites’ homepages – thetimes.co.uk and sundaytimes.co.uk. It’s interesting to see what’s not included in the £1 day pass option: email bulletins, mobile access and daily puzzles.

What the web and world is saying about it:

Techdirt: The problem of reporting on your own paywall

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Interesting round-up from Techdirt on how newspaper companies and titles report on their own paywall plans. The post follows news that US company Gannett, which owns a number of regional US newspapers and the UK’s Newsquest group, is beginning a paywall experiment.

Argues Mike Masnick for Techdirt:

They give misleading headlines, they pretend that paywalls are some huge journalistic advance (rather than just a business model choice – and one that’s been tried and failed a bunch), and most importantly, they all totally bury the lede, and don’t bring up the paywall until many paragraphs into the article.

(…)

What we’re seeing is the implicit realization that these newspapers know a paywall won’t work. If it was something their audience wanted, they would be upfront and honest about it. Or if they had a good rationale for the decision they would be upfront and honest about it. Instead they have to be misleading, defensive and hide the important point. Quite an “experiment” by Gannett…

Full story at this link…

Related reading: From news:rewired – the nouveau niche, the Times’ Tom Whitwell, Reed Business Information’s Karl Schneider and MSN UK’s Alastair Bruce on the future of paid-for news.

Google looks to failed searches to find story ideas

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A string of digital media companies producing story ideas based on unfulfilled online searches face a new adversary in the form of Google.

According to a report in the Financial Times, the search engine registered a patent earlier this year for “a system that would help it identify ‘inadequate content'” online and subsequently provide ideas for desired news stories.

This service could then be potentially sold on, competing with other companies already trying to develop similar systems.

Read the FT report here.

Also in Google news, it is rumoured that the company will be launching its own paid-content system, Newspass, by the end of the year.

According to paidContent:UK, Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports that content from a publisher signed up to Newspass will be indicated by a paywall icon.

In a statement to paidContent, Google said:

“Our aim, as with all Google products, would be to reach as broad a global audience as possible,” indicating potential for a global roll out of the system.

Full story at this link…

Media Release: News Corp invests in newspaper paywall business Journalism Online

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News Corporation has announced an investment in Journalism Online, the company founded last year by former US newspaper executives Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery to help newspapers charge for their websites.

“We’re especially pleased with this investment because News Corp. is the industry leader in making the case that there is value in journalism online for which readers will be willing to pay,” says Crovitz in the release.

Journalism Online says its Press+ system will offer newspapers and publishers a range of paywall options from metered access, such as that used by the Financial Times’ website, and give users a common login across the sites it serves.

In September, Nieman Journalism Lab reported that Journalism Online would take 20 per cent of subscription revenue after credit card fees. The move by News Corp underlines its commitment to charging for content online, as shown by new paywalls for the Times and Sunday Times websites.

In the same release, News Corp also announced that it is buying Skiff, the e-reading platform developed by Hearst Corporation.

Full release at this link…