Surely you keep blogs out of pay walls?

As the New York Times prepares for paywall territory,Arthur Sulzberger, Janet Robinson, and Martin Nisenholtz of the NYT all took the opportunity to talk at length about their paywall plans.

Reuters reports that

Nisenholtz did say quite clearly that he expected ad revenue to go up rather than down, which implied to me that that paywall was going to be pretty porous.

However the biggest shcok seems to be that the blogs will be behingd the wall and this could really be a bad move.

blogs rely on loyal readers who come back to read them often. But few blog readers are loyal enough to pay for the privilege of reading that blog.

Later says the report,the NYT's confirmed that yes blogs would indeed be behind the paywall

Le Figaro's paywall plans

French paper Le Figaro has unveiled its payment model to the world.

The good news is that it will keep its main news section free and instead raise revenues from its loyal customers whom it figures will pay for an online archive, the best of The New York Times translated into French and access to a digital version of the newspaper available from 3am each morning.

Good model? Well possibly but once again proving that news is essentially a commodity and its ancillary services that will pay for journalism.

One other interesting concept though is that paid up subscribers will be ablr to connect with others creating a social network that will sit behind a paywall.

The packages start at around 7 pounds a month risng to 15 for the superior business service.


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"If I stop to think about the business model, it is sometimes quite scary."

Who said that?

No other than Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger speaking to journalism students last week whilst reiterating that paywalls will not be surrounding his paper.

But as John Gapper writes in the FT,

In any other industry, charging customers would not be a radical idea.

For him the myth of the link economy needs to be addressed

believing that any gains from subscriptions will be outweighed by losses in advertising and brand equity.

adding that

The point that link economy enthusiasts miss, I think, is that the trade-off between subscription and advertising is not a zero-sum game. Rates for online display ads have been falling steadily as competition has proliferated, with most sites now finding it hard to get more than $4 per 1,000 impressions on their pages (or $14m for the 3.5bn hits on all US newspaper sites monthly).

Barriers will go up at the NYT

So as predicted the paywall is coming to the New York Times.

This from the paper itself

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.

and some food for thought from Chris Anderson

there’s more to the New York Times’ decisions on meters and paywalls than just the question of whether the strategy will succeed economically. There are questions about how the internet has already changed the Times, and how the dawning world of niche-reader taxation will change journalists’ ideas about what they do and who they write for. And there are questions about how we ourselves see the “public” we are a part of. We live in a world where were our “nicheness” has never been more obvious, and one of the great questions in the years ahead is whether we are still capable of seeing ourselves as a part of something more. In order to do so, I think we need to radically rethink what we mean when we say the word “public.” Down with structural notions like “public spheres,” or even phrases “networked publics!”

A chance for media innovation

Simply putting content behind a paywall is not in itself the solution to the problems of the industry.

As Paid Content reports the comments of the Times Media’s digital development head Hector Arthur who says

The Times must meet the “commercial necessity” to innovate before raising the paywall next year,

He adds

We’ve been focusing on what will that mean for the reader. .. and what will that mean for our journalism.” Within that, he’s emphasising presentation: “It’s important to innovate around how you deliver.

The Spectator seems happy with its paywall

This morning has seen a couple of interesting items regarding the paywall.

Chris Tryhorn of Paid Content reports on James Harding, the editor of the Times' comments yesterday.

Pledging to “rewrite the economics of newspapers”, Harding said the Times would charge for 24-hour access to that day’s edition of the paper alongside a subscription model, but dismissed the idea of micro-payments for individual articles.
Harding said the newspaper business had to avoid the mistakes of the music industry – and call time on free distribution.

Meanwhile the Spectator has announced that it hasn’t been hit that bad after raising the wall in September. It has lost around 2 per cemnt of its traffic following the switch but actually sales of the magazine have increased in the six weeks since its introduction.

Next on the agends=a is its luanch of the I-phone app which it will charge 59p a week for.

That will be a very interesting development to watch.

From where I’m sitting their business model and plans are all over the shop

There is a very interesting comment on Paid Content about the decision of New Media Age to go behind a paywall,

It comes from Ashley Friedlein,CEO,Econsultancy

Well… good luck to them. Brandrepublic (Haymarket’s mad.co.uk equivalent) will go the same way soon.
But I don’t rate their chances if they think news, however “big-hitting”, will sell. I can’t complain because it will only benefit the likes of us (niche) on the one hand and bigger free media players (in particular the BBC) on the other.
If you take a look at the traffic stats for our site (http://econsultancy.com) versus nma.co.uk verusus brandrepublic.com (see http://siteanalytics.compete.com/econsultancy.com+nma.co.uk+brandrepublic.com/ for rough idea) then the outlook looks even more bleak. This is the state *before* they put up the paywall…?!
Meanwhile, Centaur are launching separate sites like http://reputationonline.co.uk/ - a hot area maybe but just further dilutes the brand and SEO equity overall.
The last edition of NMA I had contained 3 ads excluding their own and excluding recruitment ads.
I really rate NMA’s content but from where I’m sitting their business model and plans are all over the shop…?

Ht-Adam Tinworth

A glitch for Murdoch's paywalls

The path to paywalls does not run smoothly with even the Murdoch empire being beset by problems

According to the Guardian this morning,the media baron

is finding it harder than expected to introduce charges for readers browsing his newspaper websites and may miss a target of next June for the introduction of so-called "pay walls".

He declined to comment on the reasons for any delay except to say that he was talking to rival publishers including the Telegraph group in Britain. "It's a work in progress and there's a huge amount of work going on," Murdoch said.

Emap puts up the paywalls

Staying with the paywall issue,Paid Content is reporting that B2B magazine publisher Emap will convert all its websites from free to pay-for, starting in the next few weeks.

CEO David Gilbertson told us in an interview that all websites in the Inform division (19 business magazines including Construction News, Retail Week and Drapers) will stop giving away free news and instead start bundling web access in with subscription packages. There’s no exact timeframe, though the process has been one year in the making

reports Patrick Smith.adding that

“We’re shifting the balance of the marketing message from, ‘this is a magazine and it has a website’ to ‘this is an information brand that delivers content across a range of media”, says Gilbertson, adding that alerting services, emails, data services and mobile apps will also come with the paid strategy

.

The first magazine to go behind the wall will be retail week in two weeks time

NYT set for decision on paywalls

Will they or won't they?

Yes it seems that the New York Times is seriously considering the paywall issue.

In his column the public editor,the paper's Clark Hoyt writes that

Though The Times retains the largest newsroom of any American paper — 1,250 reporters, photographers, editors, columnists, graphic artists, Web producers, videographers and more — it is about to cut 100 people through voluntary buyouts and, if needed, layoffs that would happen in the weeks before Christmas. Editors say they are determined to minimize the impact on readers, but some of those readers are worried

and tells that Scott Heekin-Canedy, the newspaper’s president and general manager, said in June that a decision about charging online readers would be made by late summer. But he said last week that executives were still studying the issue.

Its editor Bill Kelner said that

“It’s a much tougher, more complicated decision than it seems to all the armchair experts. There is no clear consensus on the right way to go.” At stake are millions of dollars from online advertisers who want the largest possible number of readers. Putting up any kind of pay wall has the potential to drive away readers and some of those dollars.

So we wait with baited breath

First the paywall now the pay app for the Spectator

The Spectator magazine is announcing plans to put its website behind a paywall and yesterday it further engrained itself into the content is not free model by launching a paid-for iPhone app which is also based on a subscription.

Paid Content reports that

The app, made by digital-edition magazine vendor Exact Editions (EE), costs £0.59. That price includes one week’s access to the current edition of the magazine in a miniaturised, page-turning, iPhone version of the real thing. But that’s not one-off payment - the payment must be renewed again and again for £0.59 a week. A month’s subscription is £2.39 and both options include access to five years of Spectator back issues.

Online readers turn their backs on paywalls

An interesting report commissioned by Paid Content which reveals that there is little enthusiasm for charging for content amongst the general public.

The figures from Harris Interactive show that

1.If their favourite news site begins charging for access to content, three quarters of people would simply switch to an alternative free news source, people who read a free news site at least once a month told us.

2.Just five percent of those readers would choose to pay to continue reading the site.

3.Eight percent would continue reading the site’s free headlines only.

4.And 12 percent of respondents are not sure what they would do.

Ziltch-that's the value of newspaper's digital content

So according to Steve Outer,the digital content of a newspaper is worth.....nothing.

Writing at Editor and Publisher

he says that whilst there is some value for advertisers

who will pay to get in front of the audience assembled to consume the content.

for the ordinary person

consumers paying for news stories online, or on mobile phones, via micro-payments or subscriptions? Not likely

Steve explains further on his blog

my main point is that whether online or on mobile devices, news publishers need to figure out how to offer something that’s tangible, not ephemeral. Selling fleeting digital news stories is a non-starter. The mobile platform offers some alternative opportunities.

Spectator to hide behind a paywall

Interesting snippet of information from Guido Fawkes yesterday evening.

According to the political blogger, the Spectator magazine

will within weeks be stealing a march on Murdoch and putting up a paywall around the magazine’s online content. The web-only stuff on CoffeeHouse will still be free, but the magazine content will be sold so as not to cannibalise the print edition.

Economist magazine will introduce a paywall model

Much touted,the Economist has announced that it is looking at plans for its new paid for model.

Media week reports that

Yvonne Ossman, publisher of The Economist in the UK, revealed to Media Week that the brand would move to a paid-for content model, following the completion of a review.

adding that it

marks something of a reversal for the brand, which, in 2007, moved to a predominantly free model.
It had previously provided a mix of paid-for and free content, before deciding to make its content free on its homepage in September 2006.

Ht-Journalism.co.uk

Factor involved in the paywall decision

Paid Content have done a quick analysis of factors involved in newspapers putting up a paywall in the US and have come to some conclusions

The newspapers tend to be located in smaller, often rural markets; online-only subscriptions are typically priced at a substantial discount to the print edition (in general, about 75% of what the print product costs); where numbers are available, the number of online subscribers is still a tiny percentage of their print counterparts (less than 5%); and many of these papers say they began charging not so much to make money online, but rather to protect sales of their print editions.

That last point is the crucial one in the business model suggesting that it is making the print version a more scarce and differentiated product.

This from one of the papers

“It will allow greater value to our many loyal print-edition subscribers by not giving away the news to non-subscribers,”

A novel idea in charging more for online

The Nieman Lab carries a report of a business model that is rather unusual in the world of paywalls.

The Newport Daily news is

charging more to read the paper online than in print. Quite a bit more, in fact. The idea: Charge enough for the online content that the paper-and-ink product looks a lot more attractive. Don’t undercut your primary product with a free alternative that doesn’t make you money. And provide an online edition for those customers who have a compelling reason to pay for content.

A very similar strategy to that which Simon Kelner was keen to promote when he came to speak at Uclan earlier this year in fact.Will it work?

We will wait and see,there is a 30 day trial at the moment for a free version,the crunch will come when readers see the paywall

Ht-Martin Stabe

Sunday Times will have to do more to justify any paywall

Yesterday's announcement by the Times group that the Sunday Times' website is to be uniquely branded as a separate pay platform has shocked the media blogosphere.

The Telegraph's Shane Richmond is not a fan of the move citing five reasons why it won't work

1.That customers won't pay if there is free content elsewhere

2.that unique content won't be enough giving the example of the Independent's pay wall of a few years ago where the best writers could only be viewed at a premium.

3.that unlike say the Ft,they are not communicating to a niche market

4.part of the uniqueness of a Sunday paper is that it is a paper and will be lying around all week to browse

5.

Separating a Sunday newspaper from its daily sister seems like a recipe for online disaster to me. Will the new, stand-alone Sunday Times update on a weekly basis?

I think that Shane has got this spot on.It will have to offer something different to justify the pay wall.

Now here is an idea-what about a purely investigative paper funded by the subscription?