The Boston Globe is failing miserably and most papers are not doing well because they don’t have the “pull” of a NY paper.

Frankly, even the “success” of the NYT is a far cry from the old days. If these papers could put more under the pay wall hood, they’d have a great chance. For example, if they offered other subscription options for other products. They could do a music service…they could do ID Theft, or books on tape…or, any number of things. You wrap different things of value together and put it under the hood…now, you can charge a lot more each month and bundle the content with the other subscription items.
That is a great path but I’m not sure the innovative mindset is there…these people complain, they look for the holy grail, and yet they shoot down 90% of the untried ideas that they are presented with…
The potential for a major consumer portal is there…and it’s the perfect place for it.

Our experience is that publishers who employ a combination of subscription and on-demand payments can convert close to 9% of their visits into paid transactions. With certain additional option the conversion rate can go up to nearly 20%. So there is a room for improvement.

I was just saying that back in 2009, when the paidContent.uk/Harris study was published, its results were called “a warning to publishers considering a paid content strategy.” Such “warnings” cost the industry billions of dollars. Now media experts like Ken Doctor ask, Why weren’t the paywalls introduced earlier? Well, why indeed? Or, a more appropriate question should be, Why the experts weren’t listening to the few publishers like yourself or those served by us (Znak it!), who had successful paid content strategies and business models? Why do they still ignore the good examples and keep saying that online readers will not pay for quality content in any significant numbers?

I’m the founder of a popular college sports web site, an unofficial site that is not affiliated with the university we cover. We have been charging for content — not all of our content is pay, just about half of it — for over a decade now, and we found exactly what that article says: about five percent of our monthly visitors are subscribers.

And yes, we consider that to be an unqualified success. We’re very happy with that number, and although we’re not getting rich, it’s enough to employ several people full-time, with benefits.

Please note that according to the authors of the study 5% people willing to pay for online content was considered “dismal.” Now paywalls convert 1 to 2 percent of a site’s traffic, and this is called “enormous success.”

Bob said, “People need content. Ignorance is more expensive than a NY Times subscription”.

Yes, especially if you have children.

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