The Washington Post will launch its paywall June 12, starting at $9.99/month
photo: AP Images
The Washington Post will start rolling out its paywall to a select group of readers next week. Read more »
New York Times CEO calls digital pay model “most successful” decision in years
photo: AP Images
In a speech to Columbia business school graduates, the CEO of the New York Times described the company’s role in media disruption. Read more »
Is it the best of times or the worst of times for journalism? Yes
photo: Flickr / George Kelly
There are plenty of reasons for pessimism about the state of the media and journalism, including repeated layoffs, bankruptcies and so on. But there are also many reasons to be optimistic about the current environment. Read more »
Politico will test a metered paywall in 6 states and abroad, but DC gets a break
Politico announced Thursday that it will test a metered paywall this week in six states, as well as abroad. But readers in the Washington, D.C. area remain exempt because Politico gets so much advertising revenue from them. Read more »
Andrew Sullivan says it’s “unlikely” The Dish will reach its $900,000 goal
photo: Albert Chau
Popular politics blog The Dish, which went independent and added a metered paywall at the beginning of this year, is probably not going to reach its $900,000 goal, founder Andrew Sullivan says. Read more »
Think micropayments for media can’t work? Greg Golebiewski says you are wrong
There is a conventional wisdom in the media industry that micropayments for online content don’t work, but Greg Golebiewski of Znak It says that this isn’t true, and that media companies need to experiment with the model. Read more »
Losses mount at Washington Post ahead of summer paywall plan
The Washington Post posted discouraging earnings Friday, with revenue and circulation down from a year ago. Read more »
Takeaways from paidContent Live: Paywalls, sponsored content and massive disruption
photo: Albert Chau
At our paidContent Live conference in New York, we heard about the disruption in publishing, journalism and advertising from speakers such as Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian, Jon Steinberg of BuzzFeed and blogger Andrew Sullivan. Read more »
The Atlantic is going to launch a paid content offering soon
photo: Albert Chau
The Atlantic will launch a paid product within the next two or three weeks, a News Corp. is touting paywalls as “courageous,” and ProPublica wants to have paywall-free nonprofit journalism in every city. Read more »
Don’t think of it as a newspaper — think of it as a platform for talent
photo: Flickr / Christian Scholz
Newspapers and other media entities have gotten used to thinking of themselves as the most important part of the equation — but why not focus on helping individual brands engage with their audiences and then share in the revenue? Read more »
Two charts that tell you everything you need to know about the future of newspapers
photo: Flickr user Zarko Drincic
The U.S. newspaper industry has lost more than $40 billion in ad revenue in the past decade — over half of that in the last four years alone — and Google’s ad revenues are now more than twice what the industry pulls in. Read more »
One downside of paywalls: Where does your growth come from?
photo: Shutterstock / Voronin76
Paywalls can bring in extra revenue for newspapers and other traditional media outlets, and they can help keep existing readers from leaving — but how do they help bring in new readers? And what happens if they don’t? Read more »
Digital First Media’s John Paton on newspapers and paywalls
Digital First Media chief executive officer John Paton says that paywalls aren’t the answer for newspapers, and that print is eventually going to go away — which is why the company needs to take more risks. Read more »
A majority of the biggest newspapers in the country now have paywalls
photo: Shutterstock / Daniilantiq
Smaller and mid-size newspapers have been the early adopters when it comes to paywalls. But now, more of the big papers are starting to flip the switch too. Read more »
Why I admire the OC Register, even though I disagree with almost everything they are doing
photo: Shutterstock / Voronin76
I may disagree with them about the benefits of a hard paywall, or the wisdom of cutting 90 percent of the newspaper’s blogs, but at least the owners of the Orange County Register are putting their money where their mouths are. Read more »
The Orange County Register’s new owners want to reinvent newspapers from the ground up
photo: Flickr / Arvind Grover
It’s a risky bet, but the new owners of the Orange County Register — two entrepreneurs with no background in traditional media — are pouring money and resources into the newspaper, and not just online but in print as well. Read more »
The Daily Mail: Paywall? We don’t need no stinking paywall
The Daily Mail, the world’s sixth largest news site, says it is not only growing digital revenue faster than most other papers, but has engagement levels that put it above Yahoo and even YouTube. Read more »
Andrew Sullivan rolls out $1.99/month payment option for The Dish
Andrew Sullivan added a new payment option for The Dish Monday: Users will now be able to pay by the month. Previously, they were only offered a yearly subscription option. Read more »
SF Chronicle puts premium content, including columnists, behind a paywall
The San Francisco Chronicle has launched a subscription-only site that puts much of the paper’s content behind a paywall. The site is free to print subscribers, and a digital-only package is $12 a month. Read more »
The “barbell problem” in media: The ends are fine, but the middle is getting squeezed
photo: Flickr / George Kelly
Some of the larger traditional brands in journalism will probably wind up prospering in the new digital era, and some hyper-local ones will as well — but what happens to the players in the middle? Their future remains uncertain. Read more »
The monetization dilemma for media: Paywalls on one side, advertising on the other
How can media companies and publishers monetize their content when advertising continues to decline and paywalls are not filling the gap? This is one of the major themes we’re going to explore at paidContent Live on April 17 in New York. Read more »
Citing “flat-lined” sales, Andrew Sullivan’s Dish lowers paywall to 5 free stories every 60 days
Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish is tightening its paywall. Users will now be able to access 5 free “read-on” stories every 60 days, down from seven stories every 30 days. Read more »
The FT has “crossed over” to become a digital business — but can anyone else replicate that feat?
The Financial Times stands out in the news industry for its clever and aggressive switch to a digital revenue model. But while the paper is an inspiration, it’s not an example. Read more »
“Finding out who your real friends are”: How David Carr views paid content
photo: Getty Images / Mario Tama
In a keynote at SXSW Sunday, NYT columnist David Carr recalled the launch of the paper’s paywall during SXSW two years ago. “The theologists of free,” he said, believe that “you keep things free, and eventually somebody will clack two coconuts together and you’ll get rich.” Read more »
Press+: Publishers are charging more for digital content and offering less free
photo: Shutterstock / Voronin76
According to Press+ data, the average price of a monthly digital subscription is now $9.26 — up from $6.85 at the beginning of 2012. Publishers are also offering fewer articles for free before a user hits a paywall. Read more »
New York Times gives Starbucks visitors 15 free stories a day
photo: Starbucks
News brands like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are turning to free Wi-Fi as a way to promote their content. In the lates example, Times readers can get 15 free stories a day while sitting in Starbucks. Read more »
Three weeks in, it may be time for Andrew Sullivan to tweak The Dish’s metered paywall
A little over three weeks into its metered paywall model, Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish has raised an additional $93,000. The pace of subscriptions seems to be slowing, so how can Sullivan keep it up? Read more »
Marco Arment’s digital magazine and the paywall vs. sharing problem
Marco Arment softened the paywall around his iPad-only magazine because his content was not benefiting from the social-sharing effect that the web enables — a microcosm of the dilemma that many other publishers are also facing. Read more »
Boston Globe’s 28,000 digital subscribers: a flop or a foothold?
The Boston Globe can be seen as a bellwether for metropolitan newspapers. Its digital strategy so far appears to be off to a slow start but some see more to the story. Read more »
New York Times plugs big leak in paywall
photo: Flickr user jphilipg
The New York Times has finally closed a popular loophole that let readers circumvent its paywall by chopping off the end of a story’s website address. Read more »
Five ways media companies can build paywalls around people instead of content
photo: Flickr / Mark Strozier
Hundreds of traditional publishers have erected paywalls around their content, but there is much to be gained by focusing monetization on individuals rather than an entire newspaper. Here are a few suggestions on how publishers could do this. Read more »
Digital First Media is working on paywalls, even though it really doesn’t want to
photo: Shutterstock / Daniilantiq
John Paton, the CEO of the Digital First Media chain, says that he doesn’t believe paywalls or subscription models are the solution to the industry’s problems, but he is experimenting with them anyway. Read more »
Guardian Media CEO explains why the paper doesn’t like paywalls
photo: Shutterstock / Voronin76
Paywalls are being erected at hundreds of newspapers around the world, but Guardian Media CEO Andrew Miller says his newspaper is still opposed to a subscription wall because it wants to expand its readership as much as possible. Read more »
The little paywall that could: Tinypass gets a CEO and some money
photo: Shutterstock / Luiz Rocha
More publishers of all stripes, including star blogger Andrew Sullivan, are charging visitors for content. This has translated into good news for paywall provider Tinypass. Read more »
Sullivan’s new Dish raises $333,000 from over 11K people in first 24 hours
Andrew Sullivan announced yesterday that he is taking his popular politics blog The Dish independent and charging $19.99 a year under a metered model. Since then, the blog has raised $333,000 from about 12,000 readers. Read more »
The pros and cons of newspaper paywalls: a Twitter debate
A comment about a Bloomberg story on the New York Times paywall started a debate about the positive and negative effects of paywalls that included some media industry luminaries such as the former CEO of Dow Jones and the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Read more at GigaOM »
87% of U.S. magazine and newspaper publishers have an iPad app, survey says
photo: NYT
A new survey from the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations) finds that newspaper and magazine publishers’ digital businesses are gradually becoming profitable, and 63 percent say “tablets are the most important digital channel for their publication’s future.” Read more »
Philly Inquirer, Daily News to launch paywalled sites in 2013
After years of providing content for free through Philly.com, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News will launch their own paywalled sites in early 2013. Read more »
Paywalls roundup: Washington Post, Daily Beast, Gannett
The Washington Post is reportedly planning a paywall in 2013, and the Daily Beast is also contemplating metered access. Gannett announced this week that it is seeing a rise in revenues as a result of its paywalls. A news roundup. Read more »
How can we build a future of post-industrial journalism?
A manifesto on the future of news published by Columbia University’s center for digital journalism argues that the news industry as we know it no longer exists, and existing players need to figure out how to adapt to the new realities of news, and quickly. Read more at GigaOM »
