The Economist — AEJMC Hot Topics

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

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:

The Guardian: Stop Taking the ‘Paywall Pill’ by Pioneering New Forms of Online Revenue

Move Over PCs, Mobile Devices Are in Town

As sales of tablet computers and smartphones increase, the PC will soon be overshadowed by a mobile world. The Economist posted an article earlier this week about the rise of mobile devices and said this,

Sales of tablet computers, though still small, are also growing rapidly. Since Apple’s iPad arrived last year, a host of rivals have appeared, such as RIM’s Playbook, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Sony’s Tablet. All eyes are now on Amazon’s Kindle Fire. With smartphones, which seem to be surgically attached to the hand of every teenager and many an adult, tablets have opened up a new dimension to mobile computing that is seducing consumers. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, believes that in 2011 combined shipments of smartphones and tablets will overtake those of personal computers (PCs).

Read the full article on The Economist