Freedom Communications Drops Pay Wall
We were just waiting for a report to come back on the results of some of the pay walls that newspapers around the globe are instituting, after the coverage Rupert Murdoch lent to the concept. To this point we learned today that Freedom Communications pay wall test, at the Valley Morning Star in Texas, was a failure.
July of 2009, Freedom decided to test the notion of pay walls for their online content and in result, moved forward with charging online news consumers $3.95 per month. Perhaps it was an attempt of trying to avoid filing Chapter 11, which they ended up doing anyway, just three months after the pay wall introduction. At the time of the pay wall launch, Freedom publisher Tyler Patton said that, “The days of giving content away, which costs money to create and for which we charge our print subscribers, I think, are just over”. Regardless of the then change, the publishing group has decided to drop the pay wall and go back to a free Web concept.
I can only speculate that the drop in traffic made it difficult for the publisher to monetize their site, as they hadn’t an audience story to tell. This test and test results, then multiplied across all of their properties, some doing not so bad when it comes to selling Web space to advertisers, in my guess, would have resulted in obvious Web revenue losses.
In an article recently posted on the Valley Morning Star, Paton is now recorded as saying “… providing free and unfiltered access to our Web site better complements our mission going forward”.
As one would expect, the group has been pretty tight lipped about the results of said test, but common sense tells you that if the venture was successful, even somewhat, they wouldn’t have moved back to a free model.
