Online media paywalls

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Leo said:
this seems odd, do you really think readers of the sun are likely to subscribe? i mean, it's not the wall street journal or anything.
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Seems like a pretty watertight business decision to me - I mean, where else are you gonna find photos of tits on the internet?
 
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paolo

Mechanical phantoms
I'm thinking of paying for The Onion, because it's only like £1.50 a month or something
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
Leo said:
The Sun to introduce £2 per week ‘Sun+’ paywall from August
http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/05...campaign=The+Drum+Daily+Update+15+May+2013+AM

this seems odd, do you really think readers of the sun are likely to subscribe? i mean, it's not the wall street journal or anything.

lots of other newspapers finally moving in that direction, still seems like a tough sell but what other choice do they have?
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Very odd. That's the same price as the Times, which charges about 3 times as much for the paper version. Also, I'm not really sure what you'd get. Most Sun stories don't go much deeper than the headline and the sleb goss they specialise in is often canibalised across the media within hours.

Most of the paywall trend is towards metered paywalls - only Murdoch going for a flat-out one that I can see. At least in the UK - they seem a bit further down the line in the US.

Anyway, I hope it works. Not for the Sun, which can FOAD for all I care, but for the industry in general. If it can't re-establish the connection between content and payment it is surely fucked.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
Anyway, I hope it works. Not for the Sun, which can FOAD for all I care, but for the industry in general. If it can't re-establish the connection between content and payment it is surely fucked.
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I always thought you'd feel the opposite, so I'm kind of heartened by this. I remember when the Times paywall started, there was a distinct sense of "yeah, see how that works, Murdoch bastards", while Alan Rusbridger was cast as the White Knight of free on-line content. Well, we've seen how that works, too: with a lot of journalists getting sacked, for a start.

It's hard to find any way of retaining high quality journalism or "quality" newspapers due to a squall of factors, but one brain-numbingly obvious way is to pay journalists and photographers to go out into the world and report it and to present the results well. To do this, you need revenue. To get revenue, you need people willing to pay for journalism. Whether these people exist in sufficient quantity is The Thing.

Having said all this, I have never subsrcibed to the Times paywall (despite Camilla Long) and I cannot discern a notable gulf in quality between the print Times or Guardian. They both span a spectrum from inane, spurious shit to Camilla Long.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
the ny times offers a combination print/online home delivery subscription deal, and apparently they now, for the first time, actually generate more revenue from subscriptions than from advertising. part of that, obviously, is because ad revenue is down compared to years past, but part of it is from a jump in subscribers.

also, they are supposed to implement a tiered subscription model with some lower-cost plans, and specialized subs for coverage of particular areas such as politics and technology. current plan is $15-$35 a month, depending on how many devices you use. and the daily print edition costs $2.50 at newsstand, $5 on sunday.
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
Leo said:
the ny times offers a combination print/online home delivery subscription deal,
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Times does that too. I used to subscribe – a Guardian editor looked at me like I was insane when I told him this – but if you subscribe to weekly ST delivery (as my folks do, so I just use their log-in) you get an online sub. Not as good as the paid online sub (I miss the digi version of the paper) but almost.
 
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