Thursday, December 03, 2009
Will paywalls work?
http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/news/091126six.shtml
It'll certainly be interesting to see if the readers of these weeklies are prepared to cough up for local news online.
You can see the logic - theirs is not the kind of commodified hard news the BBC gives away free - well at least not the real parish pump stuff - and even if the BBC did do more local news they couldn't afford to staff the area as well any local publisher does.
But will anyone pay enough for news and features online to make a serious self-supporting business model? The evidence looks poor so far. At best it could be an extra revenue stream. But unlikely a standalone one yet.
The problem, of course, is that publishers have seen rivals make some people pay. So they want, and need, some of that action. But they've mainly so far been business people getting expert news and analysis (often paid for by their employer, not them) which they need rather than simply want - from specialists such as the FT and the WSJ. Even brilliant, expert-written publications like The Economist have struggled to make their online strategy work and have gone from all free to sponsored and now archive-behind-the-paywall.
So will the public get used to and accept paywalls? As ever, there's no simple or wide-ranging answer.
Does everyone pay into an honesty box for drinks at work after they've been free before? Some do, some don't, some go elsewhere!
If ever there was a test of how good your content is, this surely is it.
It'll certainly be interesting to see if the readers of these weeklies are prepared to cough up for local news online.
You can see the logic - theirs is not the kind of commodified hard news the BBC gives away free - well at least not the real parish pump stuff - and even if the BBC did do more local news they couldn't afford to staff the area as well any local publisher does.
But will anyone pay enough for news and features online to make a serious self-supporting business model? The evidence looks poor so far. At best it could be an extra revenue stream. But unlikely a standalone one yet.
The problem, of course, is that publishers have seen rivals make some people pay. So they want, and need, some of that action. But they've mainly so far been business people getting expert news and analysis (often paid for by their employer, not them) which they need rather than simply want - from specialists such as the FT and the WSJ. Even brilliant, expert-written publications like The Economist have struggled to make their online strategy work and have gone from all free to sponsored and now archive-behind-the-paywall.
So will the public get used to and accept paywalls? As ever, there's no simple or wide-ranging answer.
Does everyone pay into an honesty box for drinks at work after they've been free before? Some do, some don't, some go elsewhere!
If ever there was a test of how good your content is, this surely is it.
