Category Archives: metered

Zerochampion: Our move to paid content

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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

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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.)"

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Jeff Jarvis’s cockeyed economics

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Nicholas Carr defends the New York Times metered access plan with reference to economist Hal Varian's "versioning" of digital goods: "Different consumers may have radically different values for a particular information good, so techniques for differential pricing become very important ... [One] particular aspect of differential pricing [is] known as quality discrimination or versioning ... The point of versioning is to get the consumers to sort themselves into different groups according to their willingness to pay."

Reuters: Running the numbers on the New York Times paywall

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Felix Salmon: "[John] Gapper seems to think that online subscription revenues can make newspapers profitable again; they can’t. In fact, insofar as the paywall makes any sense at all, it does so only as a tool to boost print subscriptions. ... [The] NYT is a mass-market general news publication: it’s not the kind of place where high-end business-to-business advertisers will pay $90 CPMs to reach C-suite executives."

Reuters: The economics of the New York Times paywall

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Felix Salmon: "it’ll be much easier to change the number of articles that people can read for free than it will be to change the price of a monthly or annual subscription. ... the experience of the FT suggests that there’s a strong temptation to [gradually reduce the number of free articles per month]: it has been dialing down n to a very low level, as it becomes increasingly addicted to online subscription revenue."

Techcrunch: The New York Times’ Online Meter Will Hardly Move The Needle

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"[At] $10 per online subscriber, the New York Times would only be replacing the online advertising revenues it lost last year. If it can charge $15 or get more than 300,000 subscribers, the numbers start to make more sense. And if the meter drives more people to subscribe to the print paper, that’s even better for the New York Times (and, in fact, I suspect that growing print subscribers is really what this is all about)."