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.

Filed Under: newspapers, paywall
Companies: freedom communications, valley morning star