Thursday, April 01, 2010
Will paywalls pay for local news?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/apr/01/johnston-press-charging-for-content
It’s a simple enough question, but there’s simply no single answer.
Whatever you think of the sites JP used for its paywall experiment and how they implemented their experiment, there’s no doubt that some people will pay for some local news. It’s just a matter of knowing who, how many, what they’ll pay for and how much.
Most of us are interested in what’s happening in our local community, so we each have a price we’re prepared to pay based on how interested we are. That’s boosted by how exclusive the stories are — if it’s available free or cheaper elsewhere why pay more?
So commodified news (basic local stories all over the BBC and commercial outlets) is out. Exclusive pictures from the local school sports? I can think of lots of grannies who’ll pay to see them. And maybe order prints too.
Also, if you have a particularly strong competence in one area people will pay for that. That’s why paywalls work for The Economist and the FT — their analysis is unrivalled, so it’s worth paying for.
But to ask for £5 upfront while the print editions costing a fraction of that are still easily available seems to have been a mistake. Perhaps if the amount had been less, in return for a shorter access period (who wants to pay for a paper three months in advance if they aren’t sure they’re going to read it every week? What about feeling they’ll lose out when on holiday?), it might have got a better response.
If JP are ever going to use a paywall model for any of their titles they’ll have to do some in-depth qualitative as well as quantitative research on why this experiment didn’t work out as well as they hoped. Because they need to know why it failed so they can get it right next time.
Other papers, most notably the News International ones which have adopted them, have shown paywalls can work with the right content and incentives at the right price. So they will be part of the future of making newspaper brands pay. How much will depend on how online advertising rates change in the future as print declines and in-depth coverage moves online.
Labels: newspapers local paywalls Johnston Press
