After three months of being a paywalled site, the New York newspaper Newsday has revealed that they’ve sold a whopping 35 website subscriptions. Watch out.
The paper, which offers only excerpts of their stories to non-subscribers, requires a $5 weekly fee to read complete stories. For comparison, the paper’s hard copy circulation in 2009 was approximately 350,000 copies daily.
The paywalled site’s lack of success came as a massive shock to Newsday staff when the figures were announced in a newsroom meeting last week. The figures are especially painful given that the paper’s new owners recently spent over $4 million on a site redesign and relaunch. The 35 subscribers have netted the paper no more than $3000. Amazingly, the paper’s editor in chief, Terry Jimenez, said, “That’s 35 more than I would have thought it would have been.”
It is worth noting that the online edition of the paper is free to hard copy subscribers and anyone who receives Optimum Cable, a company also owned by the paper’s new owners. According to Newsday representatives, over 75% of Long Island residents meet one of the two criteria.
Jimenez also argued that the site was not intended as a revenue earner, but as a service for loyal subscribers. Even so, traffic has fallen off sharply since the paywall was introduced. According to Nielsen Online, the site received 2.2 million unique hits in October 2009, the last month before the paywall went up. November’s traffic dropped to 1.7 million hits and December’s traffic slid even further to 1.5 million hits, an approximately 30% drop in traffic in two months.
If they weren’t paying attention to the naysayers before, the New York Times will be paying attention now. While the New York Times has a much broader reader base and (no offense, Newsday) better content, readers will likely strongly object to the paywall system. It is quite important to note that the Times’ paywall structure is different than Newsday’s. The New York Times site will allow readers to browse a certain number of articles for free before being prompted to pay for content. However, the traffic drop from the Newsday site will certainly cause concern for the proponent’s of the Times’ paywall plan, and will hopefully make them reconsider their decision.
Since nobody else seems to be asking it, I'll ask: why should NY Times, or any other newspaper for that matter, offer all their content for free to anyone? Why should they reconsider the decision to put up a paywall?
Sure, some “news” sites don't really spend much money or effort to creating news. But sites like NYT, WSJ etc do. They actually have significant expenditure. So why should they offer all their content for free?
If you think advertising is magically going to pay for all of this, you're in for a bad surprise. Advertising is no silver bullet.
Since nobody else seems to be asking it, I'll ask: why should NY Times, or any other newspaper for that matter, offer all their content for free to anyone? Why should they reconsider the decision to put up a paywall?
Sure, some “news” sites don't really spend much money or effort to creating news. But sites like NYT, WSJ etc do. They actually have significant expenditure. So why should they offer all their content for free?
If you think advertising is magically going to pay for all of this, you're in for a bad surprise. Advertising is no silver bullet.
Since nobody else seems to be asking it, I'll ask: why should NY Times, or any other newspaper for that matter, offer all their content for free to anyone? Why should they reconsider the decision to put up a paywall?
Sure, some “news” sites don't really spend much money or effort to creating news. But sites like NYT, WSJ etc do. They actually have significant expenditure. So why should they offer all their content for free?
If you think advertising is magically going to pay for all of this, you're in for a bad surprise. Advertising is no silver bullet.
I tend to agree. While I like that the local paper offers their content onlne at no charge, it's certainly not up to par with the New York Times or the WSJ. Even so, there are significant costs associated with good journalism, not withstanding the costs of domain registration, site hosting, programming, maintenance, or printing and distribution. My point being, there is a significant cost involved for good news. Why shouldn't it be paid content online? Just because similar content used to be free?
I would predict that the general public would begin to get their news from less reputable and poorly written news sites or blogs, such as this one. Not saying that this is not an enjoyable blog, but die hard journalism it is not. It's the nature of the beast. People are cheap. We don't want to pay for good content, but such content costs money to create. Eventually good paid news sites will be the way we receive our news, but in the meantime, we will have a lot of misinformation, and a resulting misinformed public (of course, I'm not saying this doesn't happen now). I would only hope that the respectable journalistic sites can hang on trough the transition.
good luck editors
If you start with something that was free, then put a barrier up, what do you expect? Yes good journalism should be paid for. But this model won't work. It's got to be advertising of something whereby the user doesn't actually feel like they're paying at all.
Why do you think mobile contracts work so well for mobile operators – all this talk of FREE minutes or a FREE phone.