Poynter. » NewsPay

It’s time: 5 reasons to put up a metered paywall

Bill Mitchell — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 11:29:19 +0000

For media executives awaiting reassuring evidence before experimenting with digital subscriptions, the time has arrived.

Simply put, their more adventurous colleagues at other companies have discovered multiple paths around the biggest risk attached to the pursuit of subscription revenue: diminished … Read more

Good starting point for any new venture: Following your customers

Bill Mitchell — Wed, 11 May 2011 21:02:28 +0000

Jon Dube has collected a dozen useful tips from Silicon Alley’s Startup2011 conference, but I find Tips Number 8 and 9 especially relevant:

8. “Find out who your users are and religiously, passionately follow your users,” (BetaWorks CEO John) Borthwick
… Read more

Three takeaways from Columbia’s Business of Digital Journalism study: Audience, advertising, aggregation

Bill Mitchell — Tue, 10 May 2011 13:00:41 +0000

Newsrooms, take note: Before you crank up your staffers in pursuit of today’s stories, have them spend an hour understanding its future.

It’s not that Columbia University answers all that many questions in its analysis of the dollars — and … Read more

How Google’s Panda Update is inadvertently encouraging even more content farms

Bill Mitchell — Thu, 05 May 2011 10:34:13 +0000

When Google introduced its new algorithm earlier this year aimed at elevating the quality of its search results, some of the hardest-hit sites were content farms like eHow, run by Demand Media.

An NPR story Tuesday shows that the … Read more

We Media NYC cranks up a checklist for entrepreneurs and their ventures

Bill Mitchell — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 11:48:51 +0000

The day was almost done by the time judge Bill Weiss described what he liked about the two ventures awarded $25,000 each in Wednesday’s pitch competition at We Media NYC.

He said the panel of judges picked Pando Projects… Read more

A Twitter countdown to the NYT paywall

Bill Mitchell — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:18:48 +0000

The discussion falls into several categories, including:

Dire warnings
Easy workarounds
Ethical questions
Best wishes
Fun stuff
Actual news

Read more on Twitter at the hashtags of #paywall and #nytpaywall.

New York Times subscription plans all about one challenge: Reader migration

Bill Mitchell — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 20:54:46 +0000

The digital subscription plans announced Thursday by the New York Times make clear that it’s time to retire the paywall metaphor. In fact, what the Times is really talking about is a forced march of its readers.

The variety of … Read more

Why Spot.us user says it ‘is one of the best advertising experiences I’ve ever had’

Bill Mitchell — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 21:41:36 +0000

Spot.us founder David Cohn has generated about $65,000 with an approach that remains true to his main focus — user-funded journalism — at the same time it broadens the pool of payers for news.

Cohn launched Spot.us a couple of … Read more

Ebert fishes some lessons from his (revenue) streams

Bill Mitchell — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 18:06:51 +0000

In a followup e-mail, Roger Ebert elaborated on some of the developments I described in Thursday’s post about his Tweets of Amazon affiliate links, a venture he likens to fishing.

I’ll sum them up like this:

Revenue trackable to

Thumbs up for Roger Ebert’s new revenue model on Twitter

Bill Mitchell — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:05:34 +0000

Six weeks into what some have billed “the year of paid content,” the most interesting ideas I’ve seen so far have less to do with corporate policy than they do with personal enterprise.

My colleague, Mallary Tenore, wrote Friday about … Read more