Subscription barrier to newspaper pay wall

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Newspaper publishers struggling to make money from on-line advertising see reader pay walls as an obvious way to boost revenue.

While pay walls work for specialist financial publishers, the jury is still out on whether making general news readers pay is realistic.

Readers happily paid for print newspapers. Some still do. New Zealand’s daily newspapers cost around NZ$2.

So you might think NZ$2 a day to access the paper on-line is reasonable.

I can think of three reasons why it isn’t.

1. Print newspapers are made and distributed. The cost of running a print plant and running trucks is much higher than the cost of moving pixels around. Newspaper sellers take a cut of the cover price. Any on-line sales would be direct. Readers expect publishers to pass on some of the cost savings.
2. Readers who buy print newspapers generally read a number of stories. They could conceivably read the paper cover to cover then do the crosswords and Sudoku puzzles. Nobody reads like this on-line. As a rule on-line reads skip from publication to publication grazing on content.
3. Print newspapers don’t have realistic free competitors. Broadcast radio and TV news is free, but it doesn’t directly compete with printed papers in the way, say, Radio New Zealand’s web site is just a click away from Stuff.co.nz.

For all these reasons, newspaper publishers are asking considerably less from on-line readers than print readers pay.

And rightly so. Instead they sell subscriptions. For example, The Australian charges on-line A$3 a week. It’s not possible to buy one day’s on-line paper, nor can readers make a small payment to reach a single pay walled story. In fact, while the price is advertised as dollars per week, customers have to buy a whole month’s access at a time.

The Australian does many things right. The price is reasonable, the bundle of print paper plus on-line access is exactly what I would choose if I needed to read an Australian newspaper each morning.

Yet asking readers to pay in advance for a whole month at a time seems wrong. Sure, many readers already subscribe to a daily newspaper delivery, but many others don’t. They buy a print paper as and when they feel a need. There needs to be an on-line equivalent requiring less commitment.

Related articles

• Subscription barrier to newspaper pay wall (billbennett.co.nz)
• The Australian gets newspaper pay wall almost right (billbennett.co.nz)
• These Are The Ten Largest Newspapers In America (businessinsider.com)
• Differing Views of Paywall Potential (newspaperdeathwatch.com)
• The Australian’s annoying pay wall quirk (billbennett.co.nz)