Yet Another Paywall Experiment Fails
from the doomed-to-repeat-mistakes dept
As we've seen time and time again, generally, when newspapers put up a paywall around their content, things do not turn out well. Yet, newspapers continue to put them up. While we applaud the spirit of experimentation, if they simply keep repeating the same experiment over and over again, with the same results, they're apparently not learning anything. So, it's not really surprising to see that yet another paywall experiment has ended badly. This time The Valley Morning Star, a small paper in Harlingen, Texas, decided in mid-2009 to implement a paywall. The paper, which has a circulation of about 23,000, was chosen as a test case for Freedom Communications' stable of newspapers.The paywall, which launched the week of July 15th, cost $3.95 a month, 75 cents per day, or was included if you had a subscription to the print version of the newspaper. The rationale was that since online readers were not paying a subscription fee, somehow the value to the print subscribers decreased:
"It will allow greater value to our many loyal print-edition subscribers by not giving away the news to non-subscribers," Patton said. "The days of giving content away, which costs money to create and for which we charge our print subscribers, I think, are just over."As we've discussed here before, this is a flawed argument. The subscription price of a printed newspaper barely covers the costs of printing and distribution, not the production of the content, which is generally funded with ad revenue.
In any case, after 8 months, the The Valley Morning Star took the paywall down, proudly proclaiming they "will be moving back to a completely FREE Web site." By now, so many of these paywall experiments have failed that you have to wonder when the industry will finally heed the lessons they teach.
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
Filed Under: newspapers, paywall
Companies: freedom communications, valley morning star
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
IT'S SIMPLE ECONOMICS!!!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
The film and music industries have paywalls around their content, and that leads to rampant piracy. However, since their content is relatively "long-life" they still manage to survive and even do quite well. Not so for news outlets, where their content is stale within a week. If they force their customers to turn to pirate news outlets, they may be doomed.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
If the papers followed your advice they would all put up a pay wall, and the internet readers will simply move on to another source.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The people that have traditionally controlled the flow of information are determined to do so in this, new age of peer broadcasting.
Their are lobbyists on capitol hill right now hammering out agreements, to push some yet unknown protection on their news. The argument goes: "It's no different than hearing a song, having a cover band play it and then selling it right along side of the artist that struggled to create it.". This is a fight that's been brewing for some time, but you can bet, it's going to come out of nowhere and get pushed through really quickly. As usual it will be embedded in some sham legislation called "Protect Children from Sexual Predators" or something else the crooked senators wouldn't be caught dead voting against... They know it's coming, these guys, the ones that are putting up pay walls they're just not big enough to know whats in the pipeline.
Q2 - 2011
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
...
...
yeeeah.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
While a massive amount of other people will go in the oppostie direction.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Well, I'm convinced!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
I spotted a really large gaping hole in your argument. Its Called Reality, perhaps you have heard of it. Currently the number of new blogs is growing at the same percentage year after year (previous I mistakenly said exponentially). A sizable chunk of them are news blogs. People are consuming news differently now than they were 10 years ago, they are choosing the news based on topics they have an interest in and from different sources. This trend is accelerating as more and more people go online and communicate with one another.
"when they become the only focus when print disappears then people will look at protecting their content more. then the subscription model is more appropriate."
Here is a word you might like to look up "Rationalization"
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
In a great Hindu legend, the king owes a single grain of rice on the first square of the chess board, and 100% (see: constant percentage increase) more on the next, and the next, and the next. It ends up being a lot of rice.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Now what would happen if one of the large Dutch print newspapers were to put a paywall around their website. More people would flock to the free ones, causing them to have bigger ad-revenues because of more ad-views, so more money to do fun stuff with and expand their empire. Meanwhile the big print newspaper is doomed to failure, as they don't have the page views and the ad views, and arguably even less pageviews than before the paywall.
It's a simple matter of knowing human behaviour.
You can't get ALL online news outlets to go behind a paywall. There will always be at least 1 rogue outlet that would refuse to put up a paywall.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I take the 4th, for fools
Is this the same group that didn’t see ANY of the financial melt down?
What kind of reporting are we really talking about?
Calling these people “professional” reporters is offensive to America. They can’t get the real stories that are affecting our country, so they latch on to the “current events” and claim they have “something to offer”.
Shame on US for listen to these charlatans.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Everyone Is Just
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Distributed News Syndicate
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Distributed News Syndicate
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The newspapers make most of there money from ads now. Before they could get money from classifieds, but that is finished. They need to increase subscribers in order to increase advertising income. Have people sign up to view content online sure but for free. This way they can charge more for advertising. There are few papers that can get away with charging people to view online and not lose viewers. A paper would have to have something that no other paper can provide. The economist or the wall street journal come to mind.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
my town
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Digital version no good for
You can have the worlds most bestest digital news site but only the physical newspaper is absorbent enough to soak up common household spills.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Paywall FAIL, Subscription Over-pricing
Another FAIL is the attempt to over-price subscriptions to websites. Blatant user gouging has been going on such that paying for extended website access and features is prohibitive. With time there will be price corrections such that users will happily pay a reasonable fee if only to help out their favorite sites. For example, it's great that the New York Times now provides paid electronic versions of their paper. However, the cost is remarkably high considering the lack of required paper printing and shipping fees. Once they adjust their subscription fee to a reasonable price, their subscription rate will increase.
Conclusion: Herr Rupert Murdoch, Führer of News Corp., is a 20th century Luddite. Like all other over-priced paywalls, his will FAIL.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
RE: Yet Another Paywall Experiment Fails
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
It's 2012', this paywall is back up, the NYT paywall a huge success
[ link to this | view in chronology ]