Comments on: Newspaper Pay Wall Alternatives

By: Karl Sakas

Karl Sakas — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:30:30 +0000

I'm not an expert on the newspaper industry, but it seems like they've been trying and failing to monetize electronic content for at least 15 years. I remember using the Washington Post's "Digital Ink" dialup online service to access articles at my middle school library in 1995 or 1996. It was the Post's clunky attempt at creating a pre-Web paid service, which seemed cool at the time. Apparently, the paper spent millions of dollars on Digital Ink but never attracted more than 10,000 subscribers: "When Digital Ink finally came on line [in the summer of 1995], subscribers had to crawl across the electronic equivalent of miles of broken glass to get anywhere. Logging on could take more than five minutes, and moving from screen to screen could take minutes, not seconds--all of which added dollars to annoyed subscribers' bills." I don't claim to have the solution but I suspect it involves segmenting readers (aka "customers"). Some heavy users are willing to pay a premium for full access. Others might do pay-as-you-go if there's an seamless, iTunes-like micropayment system. A huge chunk of people will never pay anything, and you have to monetize that some other way.

By: Phil Buckley

Phil Buckley — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:06:04 +0000

Joshua & Karl – I agree that sharing needs to be encouraged All the McClatchy newspapers have a threshold that allows each paper to set how many pages you can view before you get the registration page, I believe the lowest I saw that set was at 10 pages for the Fresno Bee, which even at 10 a one-time visitor should be fine.

The idea of a hard pay wall like at the NY Times is a stickier wicket. I do remember that when the NYT’s first tried the pay wall, you could get around it by following a link the Google using the “first click free” program.

By: Karl Sakas

Karl Sakas — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 15:02:38 +0000

Adding gaming to your login to access additional features? I think it'll work for major papers and for readers' hometown papers. For instance, I'm registered for the New York Times and the Washington Post because I read their articles regularly (and I have a Sunday subscription to the Times, which gets me behind the pay wall). And I recently registered for the News & Observer here in N.C., because it's my local paper and I care about Triangle news. But this share-us-to-get-access approach wouldn't work when people wants to read a one-off article. Sometimes I'll get a link to an article in a small or medium-sized paper somewhere else in the country, only to run into a (free) registration page. That's annoying -- I'm only there to read the single article, not to create an ongoing relationship with the paper. I might check if BugMeNot.com has a working login but if I can't access it in under a minute, I'll abandon the site. I like the idea of offering special bonuses, like how Seth Godin gave free access to a live event if you bought three copies of Tribes (and then readers suddenly had two extra copies to give away to friends).

By: Joshua S. Sweeney

Joshua S. Sweeney — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 14:29:37 +0000

That IS a novel idea that seems like it would go far for inducing participation. I don’t know if I personally would do it, though, at this point in time. Occasionally I’ll run into pages that prompt me to do something extra to get an additional story or feature or something, and I’m very rarely interested in doing so. The idea of browsing news at work is having as little time and effort expended as possible, and if I have to jump through a hoop to continue my reading, commenting, what have you, I’ll usually look for my content elsewhere.

As more online venues move to a pay wall model, though, this model would stand head and shoulders above the rest.