Category Archives: paywall

WSJ.com: Apple Antitrust Issues Raised by Subscription-Service Terms

Posted on by
Reply
"Apple Inc.'s new subscription service could draw antitrust scrutiny, according to law professors. ... Publishers, for example, might claim that Apple dominates the market for consumer tablet computers and that it has allegedly used that commanding position to restrict competition. Apple, in turn, might define the market to include all digital and print media, and counter that any publisher not happy with Apple's terms is free to still reach its customers through many other print and digital outlets."

Newsonomics: Apple’s “New” Policy: Looking Beyond Digital Circ Dollars to Ads & Data

Posted on by
Reply
Ken Doctor: "there’s little surprising in the Apple announcement. After all, what it said publicly is what it has said privately to news and magazine companies for months. Your old business is still your business, but the new business — when we help you get it — is our business, too. For Apple, that’s a logical position, and the logic is backed up by a big number: 160 million. That’s the approximate number of iTunes account holders, a number 40 times bigger than the largest newspapers in the U.S. and Europe. You want access to our customers, Apple says, pay us."

GigaOm: Apple Gives Media Companies a Carrot, Tied to a Big Stick

Posted on by
Reply
Mathew Ingram: "[Apple's new iOS subscriptions policy] leaves publishers to ask themselves: How much is it worth to let Apple handle your sales for you? ... Market dominance is a powerful thing, however, and so far, Apple has the customers that publishers want to reach. For better or worse, they’ll have to submit to the stick if they want access to that carrot."

Telegraph Blogs: Apple announces App Store subscription service

Posted on by
Reply
Shane Richmond: "To put [Apple's subscriptions policy] into perspective, here’s what a newspaper pays to a newsagent to sell its papers: about 28 per cent. You can argue all you like about whether or not it’s fair that Apple takes a similar cut – and American papers, who traditionally rely a lot more on subscriptions might be more concerned. What does it mean for a service like Spotify, however? They will now have to offer the ability to subscribe within the app at the same price as – or less than – the £9.99 that its subscribers currently pay. Will they raise prices or take the hit themselves?"

Nieman Journalism Lab: What Apple’s new subscription policy means for news: new rules, new incentives, new complaints

Posted on by
Reply
"At first glance, this is exactly what a lot of publishers were fearing: Apple setting itself up as a toll-taker on news orgs’ road to a new business model. ... For publishers who had been counting on a new rush of tablet revenue to support a lagging print model, it’s disappointing to learn that, in exchange for the convenience of a “Buy” button in their iPad app, they’ll have to give up 30 percent of the revenue it generates."

The Economist: Bold newspapers: The crucible of print

Posted on by
Reply
"The strategies being pursued by News Corporation, the Daily Mail and General Trust and Lebedev Holdings rest on distinct assumptions about what readers want, what they will pay for, and the future of advertising. It is highly unlikely that all three experiments will work. It may well be that none of them does. But none can be faulted for lack of boldness."

Press Gazette: Guardian memo: 54,000 a month behind Times paywall

Posted on by
Reply
"New research from Experian Hitwise has been used by The Guardian to suggests that 54,000 people a month are accessing content behind the paywall of The Times and Sunday Times. The research was commissioned by Guardian News and Media and published internally on the company’s intranet yesterday."

TheMediaBriefing: FT.com’s Rob Grimshaw on mobile, customer data and multimedia journalism

Posted on by
Reply
"In the second part of our exclusive interview with FT.com head honcho Rob Grimshaw, we tackle some of the specifics behind the FT's digital strategy. That includes: how the site uses customer data, why mobile is so important and how the profits from those 189,000 paying customers are re-invested back into multimedia journalism."

New York Times: An iPad Newspaper From News Corp

Posted on by
Reply
How quaint. "The Daily ... will be produced into the evening, and then a button will be pushed and it will be 'printed' for the next morning. There will be updates — the number of which is still under discussion — but not at the velocity or with the urgency of a news Web site. ... And at a time when the ecosystem of news is driven by links, The Daily will have no inbound links from other sites, and nothing outbound either..."