psmith, journalist: B2B publishers make money from paywalls; can consumer media do the same?
Tuesday, 9 March 2010, 21:49
"'We’re moving the mindset of our audience, our own people and advertisers to think that this isn’t a magazine but an intelligence provider,' [Emap CEO David Gilbertson] says. And it’s working, so far: new subcription rates have more than doubled on those titles, while some have seen new subscriptions and renewal rates multiply by four or five times. Gilbertson says his target is to reach an annual ten percent lift in renewal rates across the company this year."
Techcrunch: Marc Andreessen’s Advice To Old Media: “Burn The Boats”
Monday, 8 March 2010, 18:45
Marc Andreessen: "All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about."
Zerochampion: Our move to paid content
Saturday, 27 February 2010, 10:06
UBM Built Environment digital director Phil Clark: "[We] will be charging for content online. As of today Building has introduced a gate on its site … So far in the switch we have tried to be iterative: to test approaches before making significant steps. The gating system we are using is based on the FT-model, where users first register after some use then pay after further clicks. As the buzzword goes it’s a freemium model."
Reuters: Lessons from FT.com
Sunday, 21 February 2010, 15:46
Felix Salmon on Rob Grimshaw's PaidContent presentation: "it turns out that there was at least one major financial company which was pushing all of its employees to use the Google loophole, rather than pay for a subscriptions. And when the FT asked them what they thought they were doing, the company just said well, you left the back door open, so we decided to use it. (Better that than to risk a lawsuit by sharing passwords.)"
Reuters: The NYT’s blogs are set to be paywalled
Sunday, 21 February 2010, 15:42
Felix Salmon: "That shocked me: 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. And if you’re someone who participates regularly in the Freakonomics comments section, for instance, you’re going to be very annoyed if you’re forced to buy a subscription to the entire nytimes.com site in order to do so. My guess is that if Nisenholtz does this, a lot of the branded blogs on nytimes.com, including both Freakonomics and Paul Krugman, will simply leave and set (back) up on their own."
Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog: How much is an article worth? ‘Dead tree’ thinking could hinder digital content economy
Thursday, 11 February 2010, 22:28
Patrick Smith on unnbundling, the ever-present elephant in the room during digital content discussions: "But to reach a competitive pricepoint, [Rupert Murdoch] and other publishers will have to massively realign the value of each piece of news and comment from its current-day, paper value of one or two pence to fractions of pence."
Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog: What’s the average cost of a news article?
Thursday, 11 February 2010, 22:24
John Thompson on Journalism.co.uk: "we calculated the average cost of an article (feature, news story or blog post) to be around £37.00. … that means at current traffic levels we would need a model of 10p per article to be paid for by 84 per cent of our current readers. …"
Forbes.com: iPad, Kindle Won’t Be Newspapers’ Savior
Sunday, 7 February 2010, 23:00
Mark Contreras of EW Scripps and incoming NAA chairman: "We haven't had any contact with Apple, nor have most newspaper publishers I've talked to. But the industry is working on a project that would enable Apple to offer content from multiple newspaper sources. It will probably launch sometime this year. Most of our papers will have iPhone apps for their news sites by the beginning of April…. we had a sports Web site in Knoxville that focused on athletics at the University of Tennessee. Behind the pay wall, we got approximately 2,000 paid subscribers at $5 per month. When we took the pay wall down, the traffic ballooned and so did its revenue. Based on our experience of publishing on the Web for 15 years, pay walls don't make sense."
SteveOuting.com: Personalized news and why the iPad is no savior
Saturday, 30 January 2010, 15:15
Steve Outing: "[Am I] suddenly going to pay for news viewed on the iPad? Umm, not likely. Because my behavior as a news consumer has changed over the years. Like many Internet users, I view many news sources every day. … Why wouldn’t I want to pay to support journalism? … Simple: Because there’s too much to pay for! News brands cannot expect me, or most online news consumers who are not loyal to only one or two or three brands, to pay monthly or annual fees to each.:
Advertising Age: Google Exec Says Newspapers Need to Re-Think Their Models
Saturday, 30 January 2010, 01:31
"only significant evolution will save [newspapers], Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, said in a talk with journalism students at UC Berkeley. … 'The verticals that drive traffic are things like sports, weather and current news, but the money is in things like travel and shopping," says Mr. Varian. "Pure news is the unique product that newspapers provide, but it is very hard to monetize.'"
Nieman Journalism Lab: Play Paywall!, the new web game sweeping the newspaper industry
Tuesday, 26 January 2010, 17:49
Genius way to illustrate the conundrum facing every news executive thinking of raising a subscription barrier: "Paywall!, our revenue game … allows you to explore the situation at the [New York] Times or at any other news site. …"
Guardian: The Hugh Cudlipp lecture: Does journalism exist?
Tuesday, 26 January 2010, 08:49
Alan Rusbridger: "My commercial colleagues at the Guardian … can't presently see the benefits of choking off growth in return for the relatively modest sums we think we would get from universal charging for digital content. Last year we earned £25m from digital advertising – not enough to sustain the legacy print business, but not trivial. … They've done lots of modelling around at least six different pay wall proposals and they are currently unpersuaded."
Steve Yelvington: The soft paywall: Some more numbers to chew on
Tuesday, 26 January 2010, 08:32
"On a wide array of local news websites, we're finding that heavy users — people who visit more than 20 sessions a month, roughly equivalent to once every workday — account for a disproportionately large percentage of the pageviews delivered on the sites. … They might account for only 2 or 3 percent of the total unique users each month, but 20 to 30 percent of the pageviews."
Gamesindustry.biz: Registration FAQ
Tuesday, 26 January 2010, 08:26
"In January 2010 GamesIndustry.biz will require anybody wishing to read our content to register with the site. That includes news, int,ws and editorials, as well as our education and directory content … [We're] aiming to evolve from a leading industry news website into the biggest trade community in the videogames business. … [We] don't believe that unqualified traffic is of any benefit for a trade-focused website."
