Tag Archives: paywall

Subscriptions, not paywalls

Karen Fratti thinks publishers need to stop using the word ‘paywall’ to describe ways online sites charge readers. She prefers we talk about subscriptions.

Fratti writes:

 let’s stop talking about putting up walls to keep people out. The paywall has only led to griping from consumers who’ve reached their monthly article limit, and unique ways to get around them. We’re wordsmiths, we know words matter, and ‘paywall’ is another relic of the old media-new media debate. Knock it off.

I agree with Fratti on this, rightly or wrongly paywall makes me think of the watch towers and armed guard that patrolled central Berlin during the Cold War. The paywall is the new media’s equivalent of Cold War thinking.

Can’t We All Just Subscribe? Why ‘Paywalls’ Won’t Get Us Anywhere – 10,000 Words.

Admit it, Newsweek is dead

Newsweek’s owners have stopped printing the magazine and announced plans for the title to live on in an “all digital format”.

In other words Newsweek is dead. Apparently there will be a tablet version and a web site supported by paid subscriptions.

Good luck with that. I doubt it will last more than a year.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against digital publishing. Far from it.

Nor am I against the idea of asking readers to pay for online publications. After all, advertising supported online publishing isn’t thriving.

Selling online ads is tricky. It can be expensive. Google Ad Words is not a practical publishing business model. A large number of online ads that come in from robotic sales operations are inappropriate, some are downright sleazy.

Getting readers to stump up for their reading material makes perfectly logical sense. I sometimes pay for online subscriptions myself.

However the sad truth is that not enough people are willing to pay for journalism unless the cost has an obvious and quick return on investment. Hence the success of paywalls for business publications like the National Business Review and the Australian Financial Review.

I can think of many print titles that limp on as digital only publications. In almost every case they are mere shadows of their former selves. They feature less quality journalism than when they were in print and the live on hugely reduced incomes.

What Newsweek sells isn’t special enough for advertisers and isn’t unique enough for readers to part with cash. Newsweek is dead.

AFR online

Australia’s positive paywall experience

AFR online

AFR online

Newspaper paywalls are not the magic bullet publishers like Rupert Murdoch hoped for.

On the other hand, they haven’t failed.

Evidence from paywall projects in Australia suggest they have a role as news publishers stumble from print into the digital age. Australia’s two national daily newspapers both now have paywalls.

Writing at ComputerWorld Australia, Andrew Birmingham reads the entrails from The Australian Financial Review and The Australian.

Birmingham’s conclusion isn’t optimistic or pessimistic. He  says results to date provide enough positive news for the publishers to convince themselves they have a fighting chance.

He is too gloomy. While Fairfax and News Corporation may struggle, the evidence points to something better than a mere fighting chance for publishers, at least online if not for their print operations.

Australia’s great paywalls

Six months ago The Financial Review changed from hiding almost all content behind a paywall to a more open model. It made online content available to print subscribers and halved the price of digital-only subscriptions.

Around the same time New Corporation introduced a paywall at its flagship paper The Australian and began selling sensibly priced bundles of print and digital subscriptions.

Last week, Fairfax said it will introduce paywalls for the online editions of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Numbers not bad

Six months after changes at the Fin and The Australian, Birmingham found an overall disappointing picture: paywalls did little to stem falling print reader numbers and failed to increase the overall pool of paid readers.

Page impressions at The Australian fell 35% after introducing the paywall. Unique browsers fell 25%.  The Fin’s relaxed paywall saw page impressions climb 82%. Unique browsers climbed 80%.

I’d say these numbers are positive and set the scene for the next stage.

Metros go behind the paywall

Next year when The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are behind paywalls, there will be fewer plausible free alternatives to The Fin and The Australian.

While there will be plenty of niche options, the only sizeable, credible free online source of Australian general news will be the ABC. Some might argue sites like NineMSN and Yahoo will plug the gap, but they offer a very different news experience.

This will strengthen the paywall strategies at News Corporation and The Financial Review.

Now put advertising in the mix

Paywalls help news publishers distinguish their sites from the rest of the web with advertisers. Today’s free newspaper websites generally feature a cluttered mess filled with nasty cheap advertisements. The Financial Review on the other hand has a clear design with a limited number of appropriate and, presumably premium-paying advertisers.

Whatever the details, a paywall means a publisher can move beyond whatever-dollars-we-can-get advertising and start to think strategically about sales. Advertising is, ironically, where publishers have most to gain from selling digital subscriptions to readers.

Apart from anything else, a paying reader is clearly committed and solvent.

Conclusion

  • Paywalls have proved less of a turn off than many feared.
  • Paywalls mean more income.
  • Now competitors have paywalls, Australia’s existing paywall publishers are no longer out on a limb.
  • Paywall readers are better advertising targets. They will lead to higher cpms (revenue per served advertisement).

Publishers aren’t out of the woods by any standard, but there are grounds for limited optimism.

Related articles

 

Paywall publishers must compete with free

Online news publishers hoping to restore profits by installing paywalls have their work cut out.

While publishers who have made the move continue to give off hopeful sounds, it seems paywall strategies aren’t the success they hoped for.

If they were, we’d hear more about it.

And let’s face it, those struggling news publishers currently running free online properties on the smell of an oily rag would all be racing to build their own paywalls if there was clear evidence the strategy makes money.

Let’s look at what’s happening with electronic books and digital music:

Writing at Techdirt, Mike Masnick says book publishers are making a better fist of the transition to digital.

Masnick quotes Rob Reid who explains at The Wall Street Journal why there’s little e-book copyright infringement compared to music piracy.  He says while book publishers aren’t great at dealing with the issues, they are doing a better job than the music industry.

Instead of fighting the move to digital, they embraced it and made electronic versions their books available for digital readers from the outset. Music companies resisted MP3 players for years.

So when digital books first hit the market, readers had legitimate ways of buying them from day one.  Most people’s first experience of ebooks would have been through legal, licensed channels and not from pirates. This kept the dollars coming in.

What does this mean for news publishers? There’s no direct lesson, news publishers don’t own stories in the same way music or book publishers own songs or books. And news publishers can’t go back to year zero and train readers to pay for online news content.

Still, it does mean whatever strategy publishers choose, they always will have to compete with free alternatives.

Not Only Can You Compete With Free You Have To If You Dont Want Your Business Overrun By Piracy | Techdirt.

Related articles

Subscription barrier to newspaper paywall

English: Collection of some Newspapers of New ...

Image via Wikipedia

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

While paywalls work for specialist financial publishers, we still don’t know if 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 for the online paper is reasonable.

Here are three reasons why it isn’t.

  1. Print newspapers are made and distributed. The cost of running a print plant and running trucks is 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. The Australian charges A$3 a week for an online subscription. You can’t buy one day’s on-line paper, nor can readers make a small payment to reach a single paywalled 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

The Australian’s annoying paywall quirk

As newspaper paywalls go, The Australian’s isn’t bad.

The A$8 a week charge for a print and on-line subscription seems reasonable. If I lived in Australia I’d take the offer.

There is an annoying quirk. Although the paywall keeps me logged on all day once I’ve entered my email address and password, the site doesn’t this information between sessions. I can’t save log-in details in my browser or with LastPass.

This means I have to manually log-in with a password the first time I visit the site each session.  While this isn’t a big deal, the it slows me down when I’m in a hurry.