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Published Mar. 23, 2012 9:29 am

Howard Owens: Newspaper paywalls create opportunities for startup news sites

“In every market where a newspaper puts up a paywall, an opportunity is created for an entrepreneur to start a local online news business. … A key rule of disruption is to target the customers undervalued by incumbents. Clearly, any news site that puts up a paywall is telling the community, ‘there’s a lot of people in this town we don’t value.’ That creates pure opportunity for the disruptive entrepreneur.”

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Howard Owens

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  • Anonymous

    Whilst I agree with the crux of the sentiment expressed in the above statement I think that when a newspaper puts up a paywall, particularly like the NYTimes, it is saying that if you are a frequent user of our site then you are obliged to pay for the service you use. I think it disingenuous to say that it doesn’t value users who aren’t willing to pay hence infrequent users can still access articles free of charge. If anything, that’s rather generous relative to other business models.