Paywalls aren’t the only way to create online revenue for newspapers

November 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Forms in incan walls

Creative Commons: Shannan Mortimer

A Canadian media commentator, Mathew Ingram, gave his opinions in a post the other day on how online newspapers can make money without paywalls. His ideas are for papers to sell non-news products such as ebooks and online events. He also suggested that news organizations look at their platforms to bring in money. Ingram said news organizations could sell their application programming interface (API) to companies who could build on them, similar to what The Guardian does.

Although the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and the The Economist are using paywalls effectively, he said that not everyone can duplicate what their doing because those publications have highly targeted markets. As for the New York Times’ paywall, Ingram said the NYT is a leading brand for national and international news and other publications would have a hard time modeling their success. Ingram also has a pessimistic view on the continued growth of NYT online subscribers.

You can read Matthew Ingram’s post here.

Other sources: 

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From Poynter – It’s time: 4 reasons to put up a metered paywall

October 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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From  Bill Mitchell on Poynter, Oct. 19, 2011 

For media executives awaiting reassuring evidence before experimenting with digital subscriptions, the time has arrived.

Simply put, their more adventurous colleagues at other companies have discovered multiple paths around the biggest risk attached to the pursuit of subscription revenue: diminished audience reach.

Here’s how they’ve navigating that tricky challenge:

  • They’ve adjusted their paywall meters to permit whatever number of monthly free visits makes the most sense in their balance of reach and revenue. The trend, by the way, is definitely toward leaky walls rather than hard ones.
  • They’ve recognized that, financially, their sites could afford to lose substantial traffic because their “sell-through” of online ads rarely approached their inventory anyway.
  • They’ve made smart decisions, journalistically, about what content should remain outside the wall.
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CJR: The Rise of Private News

July 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Chrystia Freeland discusses niche news models and the costs associated with private news at CJR:

[...] Some of the companies faring best in the news business today have built an entirely different model, what we might call private news, and are working on an entirely different balancing act. Their challenge is to determine the right mix of focused, professional content—sold to a relatively small client base, usually bundled with data, for extremely high rates—with consumer content, which brings in less money but reaches a bigger audience. [Read more...]

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The push for paywalls mischaracterizes the nature of online newspaper readership

July 20, 2010 By 1 Comment
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As U.S. newspaper publishers increasingly talk of building paywalls around their online content to ward off free-riders cannibalizing their print product, new research suggests that such efforts may backfire because most local users of local newspaper sites already are paying customers—by paying for the print edition.

A study published in the latest issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly found that two-thirds of visitors to local newspaper websites are “hybrid” readers—that is, they regularly read the print edition (and most of them pay for it) as well as the online version—in contrast to the remaining one-third of “online-only” readers. [Read more...]

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