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Are Paywalls Really Catching On?

By Mark Evans in Uncategorized 4 Comments Tags: ,

Round pegFor the past decade, a growing number of publishers have valiantly attempted to make paywalls work to generate revenue from sources other than advertising. Unfortunately, it’s been like trying to pound a round peg into a square hole.

The problem is consumers have too many content choices so if they are forced to pay for even quality content, many of them will opt for something that’s free. At the same time, consumers have grown accustomed to not paying for anything online.

But is this resistance changing? A Bloomberg story suggests paywalls are slowly gaining traction, illustrated by the New York Times having 100,000 subscribers while Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London has more than 80,000.

“The mood is changing,” Charlie Beckett, the director of the Polis media research unit at the London School of Economics told Bloomberg. “Murdoch and the New York Times have taken the leap, and that encourages people. It’s still a leap”.

For publishers, they are desperately hoping the mood is, in fact, changing because they’re still scrambling to determine how to convert pageviews into revenue. Despite a decade of experimenting, they have yet to come up with a winning formula.

Leading the paywall charge this time around is Murdoch, who is intent on making paywalls stick even if inflicts terrible pain in the short-term. To give payrolls a shot of working, someone needs to be the sacrificial lamb, a role that Murdoch seems to have embraced.

If Murdoch is willing to stay the course, it might – and this is a huge might – encourage more publishers to introduce paywalls. If enough of them take the plunge, it could shrink the number of high-profile free sources to point where more consumers may – and this a big may – be willing to pay for content.

Of course, there will always be free content that will compete with paid content for attention. At the same time, many consumers will be happy to pay for good enough if it’s free rather than pay for high-quality content.

This isn’t to suggest paywalls are doomed or will enjoy only a modicum of success but anyone who suggests paywalls on are a major roll toward a lucrative future are probably fooling themselves.

The mood may be changing but it’s not changing fast enough and I suspect it won’t change enough to fix all the woes of online publishers.

Apparently, People Will Pay for Online Content

By Mark Evans in Media 2 Comments Tags: , , , ,

There’s a lot of chatter about a Forrester Research report suggesting that 80% of Internet users in North America won’t pay for online newspaper and magazine content. This bolsters the contention that pay-to-play within the online content world is a non-starter.

But what if you flip the Forrester report upside down, and consider the fact 20% of North American Internet users are willing to pay for content. That’s a fairly encouraging number in the wake of the widespread belief that online content should be free.

The obvious question is what kind of content will people pay to read. My sense is that high-profile brands such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall St. Journal, the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, et al could attract a significant number of customers because their content is deemed to have value – and not seen as a commodity.

Personally, I’d pay $5 or $10 a month to have full access – Web, mobile – to the New York Times. Heck, I’d probably pay $5/month just to read the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Maybe my belief in the viability of the pay wall is off the mark but I do believe there is content worth paying to access, and I believe there are many people willing to pay for it.

For more, check out this blog post on ReadWriteWeb by Frederic Lardinois.


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