Play the paywall game

Fancy your chances of getting the economics of wrapping a paywall around your content,well turn to Nieman Lab's model.

How do you play? First, hit “Turn Paywall On!” From there, “Views before paywall” is the most fun slider, and the number that many paywall discussions focus on. This sets the number of free pageviews (not the same as stories) that are allowed for each reader before requiring them to subscribe. As the number of free views decreases, the net revenue jumps as each audience segment hits the paywall, then falls from lost ad impressions. Somewhere, there’s a sweet spot.

But remember at the end of the day it is all objective

We just don’t know how readers and advertisers will react.

A call for arms for the media to protect democracy

A call to action for the media to protect our democratic traditions by Eric Newton from the Knight Foundation over at Nieman Lab.

We are now deep into the second decade of the World Wide Web. It was our hope that when our leaders were finally ready to change things, they would consider a new perspective.

he writes harking back to earlier claims that

1.Our news systems are not good enough,

2.They don’t engage everyone,

3.We need alternatives.

The hard part is ahead of us: that is, involving every aspect of our communities in this issue, governments, nonprofits, traditional media, schools, universities, libraries, churches, social groups — and, especially, citizens themselves.

Back to the problem of the oversupply of news

One of the problems of the current business model is the oversupply of news.

As economic theory says the greater the supply the lower the price is demand remains constant.

As Nieman Lab reports,Tom Curley, president and chief executive of The Associated Press spoke to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong.

The truth he said was that

the market for news is growing. But the reality is — and none of us can create some fantasy picture here — there is an oversupply, at least in the short term, of us. And so that is creating some differences in the market, and I see these being resolved by innovation and creativity over time.

For a full transcript of the talk check out the link HERE