May 20, 2013
11:31 am
At Columbia Business School Sunday, New York Times Co. President and CEO Mark Thompson spoke to new MBAs about “conventional wisdom and all the apparently excellent advice that flows from it.”
Take my industry. The movies are finished. TV advertising is dead. Exactly what happened to music will happen to TV. Nobody wants news anymore. No one will ever pay for anything on the internet. Not just said, but said widely and widely believed. And – for the most part and within the time horizon which the prophets themselves were suggesting – just plain wrong.
“
Jeff John Roberts, Paid Content
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Rick Edmonds
Apr. 29, 2013
6:52 am
On Tuesday, the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly ABC) will announce circulation totals for American newspapers, as it has done in regular six-month cycles for as long as I can remember.
I will hazard a guess about the results, but … Read more
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Andrew Beaujon
Apr. 15, 2013
6:49 pm
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Joshua Gillin
Apr. 5, 2013
10:43 am
Orange County Register |
Nieman Journalism Lab |
Los Angeles Times |
SoCal Connected
The launch on Tuesday of the Orange County Register's online paywall is only the latest in a string of changes brought on by publisher and CEO Aaron Kushner. The business practices and philosophy he and Freedom Communications President Eric Spitz are bringing to the newsroom have garnered plenty of attention from the industry.
Most recently, Kushner and Spitz
told readers the implementation of the paywall is proof "we are dedicated to ensuring the satisfaction of our loyal customers, and we understand how frustrating it can be to know that others are getting for free the same value you are paying for." Ken Doctor
wrote about the move for Nieman Journalism Lab, noting that Spitz said there were "four things that are totally unique" about the way the Register is restricting access.
(more...)
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Andrew Beaujon
Mar. 28, 2013
1:36 pm
The San Francisco Chronicle
installed a pay model this past Saturday, and just this week two U.K. papers announced
they'd ask readers to pay some of their freight. But even beyond those news hits, there's been plenty of talk about paywalls this week...
• "We didn't design this model to support print but in fact what we've seen is an increase in home delivery subscriptions, in particular on Sundays," The New York Times' Paul Smurl told Rachel McAthy while
talking about The New York Times' paywall's second birthday. "That's explained I think by the fact that we made the digital subscription product available to our existing print subscribers as part of that subscription, we added hundreds of dollars of value to that subscription overnight and people thought twice about cancelling that subscription because it was much more valuable."
• Felix Salmon says it's impossible for news organizations to test what pay schemes will work for them without just launching something and hoping for the best.
Then he predicts the future:
At some point, the industry is going to informally settle on a single management-consultancy company to ask for paywall advice from. Everybody’s going to use the same company, with the result that the consultancy in question is going to see real internal figures from lots of different newspaper publishers, with lots of different models. The consultancy will then—for a price—tell its clients what “best practice” is in the industry, which is code for “this is the way that the most successful newspapers are doing it”. No one site can easily do A/B testing on its own. But put them all together in the head of a well-connected management consultant, and it becomes much easier to see what’s working and what isn’t.
(more...)
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Jeff Sonderman
Mar. 25, 2013
4:43 pm
The Dish
After raising a few hundred thousand dollars immediately and about
$611,000 after a few weeks, subscriber growth is slowing for Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog.
Sullivan
wrote Monday that income is now at $653,000 out of the $900,000 he needs to break even. If you do the math, that's about $42,000 in new revenue over the past 30 days. "That’s 72 percent of our goal in almost three months," he said, "but almost all the likeliest subscribers have joined already. It gets tougher from here on out."
- A Daily Dish chart of subscription sales shows the decline after a strong launch.
As a result, Sullivan has
tightened the meter from seven free reads a month to five over two months, and on Monday announced a new
monthly subscription option for $1.99. (Annual is $19.99.)
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Mallary Jean Tenore
Mar. 25, 2013
9:02 am
San Francisco Chronicle | CNET
The San Francisco Chronicle has debuted a new site,
SFChronicle.com, which will offer "premium" content that's different from the content on the Chronicle's main website, SFGate.com. The Chronicle, which launched the new site on Saturday,
explained what the premium content entails:
Premium stories and columns will update and change with the news throughout the day. Subscribers also will have full access to the Chronicle's most enduring legacy — its columnists. The list of premium content goes on, including the Chronicle's award-winning coverage of sports and the outdoors, the arts and cultural events, pop music and entertainment, architecture and urban design, the environment and climate change, business and technology, food and wine, health and fitness, politics and government, and editorials and op-ed pieces, plus all the other quality content and features found in your daily newspaper.
CNET lays out the subscription prices:
The lowest-priced subscription for all-digital content costs $12 per month -- but readers can sign up to get the same online content, plus the Sunday edition of the newspaper delivered to their homes, for the exact same price. Digital access to SFChronicle.com plus Friday-Sunday delivery costs $3.60 per week, while access to the site in addition to Monday-Sunday delivery will set you back $5 per week. (more...)
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Andrew Beaujon
Mar. 18, 2013
2:28 pm
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Mallary Jean Tenore
Mar. 11, 2013
7:13 am
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Jeff Sonderman
Mar. 5, 2013
12:08 pm
Paywall software provider
Press+ released new data today about the more than 400 publishers who use its service to charge for digital content. (
Poynter uses Press+ to solicit donations.) Overall, publishers are gradually squeezing readers with higher digital subscription prices and fewer free articles per month.
Infographics below, provided by Press+, show the trends. Earlier data from the company showed that
sites producing more content made more money from digital subscriptions.
(more...)
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