TechDaily Is The Latest Paywall Casualty
from the too-expensive dept
Here at Techdirt, we've been paywall skeptics for a long time, and the last year has given us a lot of examples to support that view, as company after company has dropped their paywalls. Jim Harper points us to the latest example of a failed paywall-based business model, although this one is a little sadder than the others we've covered: TechDaily, an in-depth tech news service for the inside-the-beltway crowd, has announced that it will close up shop early next year. TechDaily's paywall was a lot higher than the other paywalls we've seen fall this year: Jim Harper reports that a year's subscription could set you back more than a thousand bucks. In the late 1990s, that was worth the money to the well-compensated lobbyists who depended on it to stay abreast of the latest developments in the regulatory issues affecting their clients, but it appears that competition has intensified and TechDaily wasn't able to hold onto enough subscribers to stay in business. Jim switched to the dramatically cheaper (but still not free) Tech Law Journal long ago. And others may have concluded that they could get enough information from blogs and mainstream news sites that it wasn't worth the extra money for TechDaily's exclusive coverage. I suspect that the biggest weakness of TechDaily's business model was that it's extremely difficult to grow your subscriber base when you've got such a high paywall. Traffic growth on the web requires that you be part of the conversation, and a high paywall means that not only will ordinary readers not be able to read your stories, but a lot of bloggers (including me) won't either. Which means that even if you've got a great product (which by all accounts TechDaily did) very few people are going to find out about it, and even fewer will be willing to shell out the thousand bucks it costs to find out if it's worth the hype.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
