How Newspaper Payment Walls Could be Damaging
The ‘pay for access’ debate around traditional media sites is still in its prime, with passionate arguments being made for both sides. From our perspective, the general application of charging readers to access content online, is a compounded mistake. As we’ve said time and time again, paid access models will more than likely work for niche online publications that have an ingrained and well known value proposition amongst the public, but general newspaper sites will have a hard time, as their content is not niche enough to ask someone to pay for it. With that, the other argument is that turning on a payment model for online content, will undoubtedly lessen site traffic, thus making it harder for publishers to monetize their online properties – the very thing they suffer with now. Given our known viewpoint, we were glad to read Brand Republic’s interview with Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian in the UK. Rusbridger stated that they were by no means looking to add a payment wall to their online portals, as he recognized that that would adversely affect their traffic amassing strategy. “My commercial colleagues at The Guardian – the ones who do think about business models – are very focused on that, want to grow a large audience for our content and for advertisers, and 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” says Rusbridger. Nevertheless, reading the Brand Republic interview and weighing the feedback we’ve received from publishers, we decided to see what others were saying in terms of statistics: How many publishers were actually taking this ‘pay for content’ model seriously?
Almost 60% of publishers say they will be implementing a ‘pay for content’ model and many of them plan to execute this within the next six months.
American Press Institute: September 2009
Many publishers admit that preserving print is their driving factor in decision-making.
Considering that all signs tell us that users are consuming content in varying ways, more so than ever; preserving print should never be a publisher’s sole focus in 2010. Publishers need to look at diversifying their media suites to ensure validity with varying audiences and advertisers.
American Press Institute: September 2009
In the same survey, users were asked if their newspaper started to charge for online content, would they be likely to return to reading the newspaper. Only 17% of users said they would return to reading the printed newspaper, while publishers (providers) felt the number would be closer to 75%.
American Press Institute: September 2009
The above data is unfortunate, as all forecasts from others outside of the traditional media industry show that ad expenditure trends are leading to online surpassing print. If newspapers stifle or limit user access to their portals, through payment walls, newspapers, again, will miss the digital revenue opportunities and more pure play news sites or social media properties will have more to gain. We liken this to the classified conundrum that players such as Craigslist and Kijiji brought about. Hopefully, we’ll learn from our mistakes.
Brian McDaniel: April, 2009
We can thank Rupert Murchoch for this. This is the worst move ever for the newspaper industry.